Before us millenials had our own take at inventing initialisms and proto emojis…
Beepers. Pagers.
A fair number of different kinds of ‘codes’ became at least somewhat widely used as shorthand for more semantically complex things, and they had even smaller character limits.
Now I was like 5 when pagers were all the rage, so I have no personal experience with these, but this was arguably the gen x version of millenials who spent too much time on computers as children coming up with ‘gtfo’ and ‘lmao’ and ‘rofl’ and such.
GenX here. Yeah I remember beepers being all the rage in a brief window of time, just before cell phones took off. They were called “Minicall” here in Sweden.
Huh! It never occurred to me that there would be other funny/cute nicknames for them in other languages, but… duh, obviously, of course there would be.
Before us millenials had our own take at inventing initialisms and proto emojis…
Beepers. Pagers.
A fair number of different kinds of ‘codes’ became at least somewhat widely used as shorthand for more semantically complex things, and they had even smaller character limits.
https://www.wikihow.com/Pager-Codes
Now I was like 5 when pagers were all the rage, so I have no personal experience with these, but this was arguably the gen x version of millenials who spent too much time on computers as children coming up with ‘gtfo’ and ‘lmao’ and ‘rofl’ and such.
Excellent point! That pushes the timeline back even further.
GenX here. Yeah I remember beepers being all the rage in a brief window of time, just before cell phones took off. They were called “Minicall” here in Sweden.
Huh! It never occurred to me that there would be other funny/cute nicknames for them in other languages, but… duh, obviously, of course there would be.
Neat!
Yeah. It could be that it was an actual brand name, but everyone called them that in any case.
Sorta like how ~1/3 of Americans refer to any kind of soda / pop as ‘Coke’.