Emoticons make me :-( and >:-(.

I wish iPhone had T9 texting, I was a much faster texter with that.

Is this where I point out that texting is actually closer to 200 years old now, or, for wireless, over 100 years old?

dittybopper: Is this where I point out that texting is actually closer to 200 years old now, or, for wireless, over 100 years old?

i cant imagine how big the cell phones were 200 years ago

dittybopper: Is this where I point out that texting is actually closer to 200 years old now, or, for wireless, over 100 years old?

No, this is where you tell is that smoke signals are pretty much the same thing and are over 500 years old.

19. They're still fresh and tight at that age. Not yet spoiled by keggers, fast food and frat boys with no tongue skills.

Oh wait, texting. This thread is about texting. Sorry. Carry on.

OK, so if you want to get *HYPER* technical, hams have been sending wireless SMS-like messages since at least 1988 (Advent of APRS - Automatic Position Reporting System and it's SMS-like messaging capability - keyboard to keyboard), and arguably since the beginnings of packet radio around 1980-ish.

For a looser definition, we've been using SMS-like abbreviations since the beginning of ham radio. Some of them are different merely because of a different time cost to send via Morse: For instance, the word "LATER" in Morse is actually shorter than L8R, because the "ATE" works out to '.- - .' instead of '---..' for "8". Generally we'd send something like "LTR" though, because it's shorter. Those abbreviations carried into the non-Morse digital modes, like RTTY, and moving forward to advanced computerized modes like packet, PSK31, Olivia, etc., largely through tradition.

I remember a couple of kids at my school having pagers that could text. It never caught on as far as I could tell until much later when phones started to do it.

WEird.

What would life be without OMG, LOL, TTYL and 'cya l8er'? And - heaven forbid - without emoticons?

Uh, all those chat acronyms predate texting, and so do emoticons.

So, after a year, its hormone will calm down and things will settle down?

ZAZ: I didn't know about SMS until about ten years ago when my company bought pagers with texting. They were supposed to be for work, but nobody really needed a cell phone, pager, or SMS for work. They just sent stupid messages back and forth.

I think they were pagers rather than full phones. Maybe the pagers received texts and cell phones sent them. I didn't have one and I don't remember exactly how they worked. Now pagers as non-phone devices are obsolete.

You don't say.

dittybopper:

tl;dr

Too old

stuhayes2010: I wish iPhone had T9 texting, I was a much faster texter with that.

Thats because you're tapping on a screen to type. Keyboard make you 1337 texter