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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

When I hear the name "John C. Dvorak" I think of his short column from the late 90s in PC Magazine about texting.

Years before smartphones, feature phones could send texts just fine, but no one really used that.

Dvorak was frustrated that he sent his father a text from the tarmac but the party on the other end never checked or responded to it. We just thought that sending texts on the TALK PHONE was corny and awkward. It was for the weirdos.

Would be great if this message in a bottle was online, but I could never find it.

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> feature phones could send texts just fine, but no one really used that.

By "no one" you must mean everyone not in high school. Texting was a huge cultural thing in the US even before smartphones.

I was in high school in mid to late 90s. I had a tiny Samsung that to this day I miss with its tiny form factor - smaller than a Razor. It definitely had texting abilities, but I was a total hermit and had no friends back then, so I don't know.

Even before phone texting, the cool students were abusing the "call back" number on pagers.

     GRAND CENTRAL
    HACK THE PLANET

I heard recently that the "text to vote" for American Idol was actually a marketing push from cell carriers to get kids to text. Before that it apparently wasn't very popular, and it's one of those "If you get them to do it once, they'll do it again" tech thresholds.

Also around the same time, Twitter came out and had the gimmick of being able to text-to-post.

That was not a gimmick, that was their core feature at the time. You have to remember that Twitter launched before mobile internet (cell or wifi) was common place, and the fact that you could link your number turned every dumb flip phone into a twitter capable device. Sure by 2010, smartphones had taken over, but for 3-4 years that was one of the main ways people interacted with Twitter.

I meant gimmick in the sense of a unique feature that distinguished it from all the other message boards and social networking things that existed at that time. Nobody I knew used texting to post (because it was expensive in those days of charging per character), but it got a lot of press for being able to post from your phone.

Texting also became expensive once the carriers figured out people wanted to use it. I remember being pissed off in the mid-2000s when I posted an item for sale on Craigslist and someone texted me about it instead of calling - that text probably cost me a quarter!

(Now, of course, I can't imagine calling a random person or putting my phone number on an item listing.)

16-year old me started a head start program so I was driving to the next town over and taking courses at the community college in addition to my high school stuff, so I was given a cell phone for eventualities.

Which I naturally used to rack up a $90 bill in SMS charges in the first month alone. My father was rather displeased and it took me a fair few mowed lawns to pay that off.

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