this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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In the ancient past when our mobileks didn't even have a touchscreen, letters were placed in groups of 3 on the numpad. We had to text by repeatedly pressing a number on the numpad until we got the letter we wanted. This also allowed for numbers to be arranged into a word.
Notable examples include
On most phones you can use this system to search for your contacts. E.g. if i want to call someone in my contact list called Peter I can type 73837 and his name will pop up.
This starts working after two numbers.
And to text/call your mother, you'd dial 666 for Mom.
And here I thought it worked because it was her area code
Whoaaa how did i never notice that thanks!
Fun fact?
Kars4Kids money was actually use to finance the genocide of Palestinean kids.
It was for Jewish youth groups in the New York area. It wasn't getting sent to Israel.
Still kind of a scam, though.
Some phone apps still have them.
I went looking for its technical name, and apparently it is E.161 (?)
Not T9?
I thought so, too, but T9 appears to be the predictive text system
Samsung's default dialer still does.
Wait, so your telling me that this was actually a thing?? I always thought it was some TV / movie thing to not actually show a number so that people wouldn't call it.
I've never encountered this outside of English speaking media so it never occured to me that this was something you can do. I feel a little ashamed, because I had a dumb phone way into 201X.
Yeah and those numbers are how texting worked
I get texing although I never used T9 dialing. I did only repeated key press thing. Ah, the time I could touch type…
Yeah, cast your mind back to the analog days, you're in your car listening to the radio, you hear an ad for something you want. You can't Google it when you get home because it's 1988. Are you going to remember 1800-225-5669 or 1800-CALL-NOW?
thanks i get it now