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What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I'm having a stroke? (jorts.horse)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I'm having a stroke?

Maybe they're used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn't explain the emails I've had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics' messages?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

T9 was so bad that I don't even understand that they threw these phones on the market.

I was there for the whole GSM phone era and the most obvious thing would have been to release a blackberry type thing with a slide out keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

T9 just adapted the earlier lettering that phones already had on the numbers. '1-800-COL-LECT' Never intended you to type it as '1-800-222666555-555332228', you'd just dial 1-800-265-5328. but that's what you'd have to do to write it with T9.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Well, that is not all it did, it had a dictionary to do predictive text, and the Swedish one was never really good.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it's almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.

I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn't always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.