In the ancient past when our mobileks didn’t even have a touchscreen, letters were placed in groups of 3 on the numpad. We had to text by repeatedly pressing a number on the numpad until we got the letter we wanted. This also allowed for numbers to be arranged into a word.
Wait, so your telling me that this was actually a thing?? I always thought it was some TV / movie thing to not actually show a number so that people wouldn’t call it.
I’ve never encountered this outside of English speaking media so it never occured to me that this was something you can do. I feel a little ashamed, because I had a dumb phone way into 201X.
Yeah, cast your mind back to the analog days, you’re in your car listening to the radio, you hear an ad for something you want. You can’t Google it when you get home because it’s 1988. Are you going to remember 1800-225-5669 or 1800-CALL-NOW?
On most phones you can use this system to search for your contacts.
E.g. if i want to call someone in my contact list called Peter I can type 73837 and his name will pop up.
This starts working after two numbers.
In the ancient past when our mobileks didn’t even have a touchscreen, letters were placed in groups of 3 on the numpad. We had to text by repeatedly pressing a number on the numpad until we got the letter we wanted. This also allowed for numbers to be arranged into a word.
Notable examples include
Wait, so your telling me that this was actually a thing?? I always thought it was some TV / movie thing to not actually show a number so that people wouldn’t call it.
I’ve never encountered this outside of English speaking media so it never occured to me that this was something you can do. I feel a little ashamed, because I had a dumb phone way into 201X.
Yeah, cast your mind back to the analog days, you’re in your car listening to the radio, you hear an ad for something you want. You can’t Google it when you get home because it’s 1988. Are you going to remember 1800-225-5669 or 1800-CALL-NOW?
Fun fact?
Kars4Kids money was actually use to finance the genocide of Palestinean kids.
It was for Jewish youth groups in the New York area. It wasn’t getting sent to Israel.
Still kind of a scam, though.
On most phones you can use this system to search for your contacts. E.g. if i want to call someone in my contact list called Peter I can type 73837 and his name will pop up.
This starts working after two numbers.
And to text/call your mother, you’d dial 666 for Mom.
Some phone apps still have them.
I went looking for its technical name, and apparently it is E.161 (?)