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Comment by ventana | Hacker News Reader

I never practiced Morse code, but I read enough about it to quickly realize that the nice sound a friend's cool new Nokia phone made on incoming SMS messages is actually ... -- ..., literally "SMS". The year was 2002 or so. I'm still amazed that someone in Nokia really thought about it back then.

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Just before arduino became a thing I had an idea to create a device that could read your your text messages by tapping out morse code on your skin somewhere, like your hip or arm.

It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.

But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.

When I was making an EEPROM programmer with an arduino, I decided to pick up the datasheet, ditch the arduino builtin stuff (I made a separate "board" which stripped the serial code out, and the time functions, because I didn't need them and they fired an interrupt needlessly wasting resources for me), and write your own interrupts for serial. It's obviously more work, but you get to implement whatever you want. You can set up an interrupt for the flow control line. The arduino libraries are shockingly inefficient and limited sometimes.

Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution

There was also another SMS sound option on Nokia phones that literally spelled "CONNECTING PEOPLE" in Morse.

Cool! I also remember from decades ago a friend in high school taught me "SOS" and still stuck with me: 3 short, 3 long 3 short, i suppose ... - - - ...

Fun fact: this procedure word is meant to be sent as a single symbol with no inter-letter spacing.

I had a Nokia phone around that time

How quickly those disappeared, the mobile phone was replaced by the "smartphone" and we entered into an abyss of data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising

In retrospect the era of the Nokia 3310 seems like such a brief period of time

"Today we are reinventng the phone" - Steve Jobs

Thanks but no thanks

I wanted a mobile (cellular) phone and a pocket computer as separate devices

Silicon Valley ruined this

you just blew my mind

was well-known back in the day.

I even did morse ringtones per a caller for few frequent ones. Even if you don't read it by ear, they are very distinctive.

Great idea!

Thanks. Also consider using V.90 modem handshake sequence for alarms. It takes much dedication to sleep through "hrrr pshh ding dang pshh". GQ alarm samples also work.

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