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I’d say they were already very common in online chatrooms long before cellphones were widely adopted. They just translated really well to the poor typing options, character limits, and per-message billing of the time so became more widely adopted (and some new shorthand created).

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sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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.

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- usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Excellent point! That pushes the timeline back even further.
  
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- mimavox@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  GenX here. Yeah I remember beepers being all the rage in a brief window of time, just before cell phones took off. They wer called “Minicall” here in Sweden.
  
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  - sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Huh! It never occurred to me that there would be other funny nicknames for them in other languages, but… duh, obviously, of course there would be.
    
    Neat!
    
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    mimavox@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yeah. It could be that it was an actual brand name, but everyone called them that in any case.
    
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PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Hold up.

I think that mobile phones became popular before chat rooms.
Chat rooms existed first, but I think that they were mostly just for nerds until the early to mid 2000s

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- sem@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Cell phones were only for grown ups and maybe rich kids, but anyone could install instant messaging software on the family computer.
  
  Everyone I knew in high school, even if I wasn’t friends with them, had AIM and even Facebook before all of them had phones.
  
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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Hold up tho. We’re all nerds here, right?
  
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