I used to be able to type messages on these without even looking
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Yep. When it's the best option, it's surprising how good and quick you could be with it. Plus it was super nice to just stealthily send a text message while holding your phone under a desk and looking somewhere else.
I just checked and I can still type them into the air
The noses on emojis didn't make the cut. :-)
And we skipped all the Polish letters like "Ł" and "Ń" because there was a 150 character limit, these used up 16 characters and messages cost money back then.
That 1 time I got in trbl 4 snd 2 mny msg n bill was hi
Yeah, when each txt was like 10-20 cents... Which isn't much. But can add up QUICK!!!
We didn't have them on our plan at the time so it was like $0.50. Dad was pissed lol.
you can still buy phones with a T9
At least one of my smart phones had a way to do it. If it's still there now, it's buried much deeper.
Pre T9 texting was s l o w
I remember when phones where an arm and a leg in price purely because of T9. Having a predictive dictionary in your pocket needed a lot of bread.
it kind of created its own language though. that was cute
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2G still works here, so nothing is stopping me to use one of those as a daily driver
T9 master race checking in!
And you’d get these messages like
yo wr gttg tgthr @ 3 w/billy- whn u b hr?
And you’d have to try to decode what the hell it meant
"Yo, we're getting together at 3:00 PM with Billy, when will you be here?" seems easy enough from ur example :)
We have the benefit of decades of parsing this sort of message. 25 years ago, this was like another language.
Especially when individuals or friend groups would make up their own abbreviations for their own slang, and you might have no goddamn idea what something meant
Good point!
So old people have their own secret language that young people can't decipher?
For once, we have the upper hand.
Hey, who are you calling old?
PM is assumed by you, but by no means mentioned or implied by the message content or context.
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The 144 characters limit. IIRC Twitter had the same limit because at the beginning you could post on your profile using SMS.
SMS is 160 characters. In the early days Twitter really only functioned over SMS. The Twitter 140 character limit was to fit the message inside an SMS with room for other info like usernames.
Interesting. I always believed the SMS is 144 characters. Incredible we had a social where ideas where sent 4~8 lines at a time (depending on the font size)
Honestly that was a blessing in disguise actually. Person had to slow down and actually think through what they we're writing, in comparison to modern voice messages where it's primarily just verbal diarrhea and the reciver has to do all the processing and filtering.
R u srs?
Fair, but voice messages are still worse, at least that example is short.
Fuck T9
All my homies hate T9
eh, you get used to it.
Real Gs used T9. Hell, I still use it to this very day on my smartwatch.
I want that phone back. I want the internet from back then too 😭
Internet from back then + accessability from today would be peak
Anyone who actually used those phones knows that you press every button once and let the T9 figure out which word you are typing
8008135
I guess if you disabled T9.
Get off my lawn, child!
Well the 3310 had T9 enabled by default
Japan still kind of has that situation as I understand it. They have more kanji than can fit on a keypad, so there’s a bit of grouping to form a particular one on larger keyboard buttons.
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nokia 3310 had T9, so no
I was faster without T9 so I turned it off
I could still type with T9 on auto pilot
PalmPilot Graffiti ftw.
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