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.
Comment on Post title lol
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days agoBefore 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.
mimavox@piefed.social 2 days ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day 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!
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.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Sorta like how ~1/3 of Americans refer to any kind of soda / pop as ‘Coke’.
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Excellent point! That pushes the timeline back even further.