SMS speak

[slinky]

If someone types "lyke" to save letters then I might judge them!

[azzam]

Maybe I'm blur, but so many more things to get worked up about in life!

[cromasaig]

Can't really argue with that! I did warn that I was a pedant, didn't I..?

[Burbage]

If someone types "lyke" to save letters then I might judge them!

Like saying www instead of world wide web.

[Fat Bob]

I don't think "double-u double-u double-u" is any shorter than "world wide web"! And it just starts screwing with peoples brains if you say "triple double-u".....

[Tack]

Burb and FB agree!

[Burbage]

I don't think "double-u double-u double-u" is any shorter than "world wide web"! And it just starts screwing with peoples brains if you say "triple double-u".....

France really missed out.

[azzam]

I just say wah wah wah. Quite a lot actually.

[Aliya]

So are we back to U and Non-U Speak yet?

[Spike]

I remember when my mum got her first mobile phone... I showed her how to send/receive SMS and explained about abbreviations. I could barely decipher her first few messages to me - she used to be a telex operator, and the telex world was full of abbreviations!

I remember telex. Being in international sales at an early age most of my communication with overseas customers/agents was by telex. With telex there was a good reason for abbreviations. You paid for a normal telephone call every time you sent a telex, so it paid to keep them as short as possible as overseas calls where hugely expensive then. I still see telex abbreviations being used today, usually incorrectly. My favourite one is "PAX", e.g. "We are expecting 15 pax at the meeting today." PAX being short for 'passenger'.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with an admin girl shortly after arriving in Singapore. I'd arranged a meeting/presentation for some prospective customers. The conversation went like this;

Spike: "So how many will be coming the meeting?"
Admin: "About 15 pax."
"So you're organising 15 packs?" (assuming brochure packs)
"Well we're hoping for 15 pax."
"You're hoping? You mean you might not have enough brochures to make 15 packs?"
"Oh yes, we have plenty of brochures."
"So you definitely will have enough for 15 packs."
"Yes"
"But how many people have registered?"
"I told you, 15 pax."

Spike gives up an asks another colleague how many people are coming cos all he can get out of the event organiser is how many brochure packs she plans to make up. Colleague then provides translation.

As for SMS speak, I'm with BFG. If someone sends me a business email using any kind of SMS speak, my immediate reaction is that this person is a lazy arse who can't be bothered with the courtesy of writing to me in proper English. Therefore, hit delete key. Or shud tht be dlt key.

[Pinklepurr]

Spike, I burst out laughing the first time I heard them use as a spoken word here, especially since they use it instead of people. I too remembered it from the telex/communications world and it just made no sense.

Same as it makes no sense to use words that are bigger as a form of shorthand in SMS speak. When that happens I really think that they just can't spell.

[Bender]

PAX being short for 'passenger'.

PAX kind of slipped into common usage - when the airlines and travel agents make hotel/meal/tour bookings, they use PAX. Most of the reservations are generated by automated systems. The other common abbreviation (not that it's very abbreviated) for people, used mainly in the food & beverage industry, is 'covers' (hence the term 'cover charge').

I worked reservations in a large hotel decades ago and most bookings from agents and airlines came via telex. I hated that machine! To prepare a message for sending, you could type it in and have the machine produce a punched paper tape, which could then be fed through a reader when sending to save time when the machine was online to another. The only way to edit a message before sending was to feed the tape through the reader and produce another tape, stopping the tape to insert characters using the keyboard, or moving the tape on (without the punch running) to delete.

One tour company specialised in tours out of Asia, and when sending a list of guests for a group reservation demanded that they be telexed back a list of the guest names along with the room numbers. With names like 'Pongsaravathany' and 'Wingcheefliedlice', preparing the response was a killer. Finally we got a machine with a screen for editing instead of the tape, but it was too late: the world was moving to fax machines.

...Which leads me to another story: The fax machine was totally new and uncommon technology. I remember handing a page to a one of my (new) staff and asking if she could fax it. She vanished to the other room where the fax machine was, and didn't come back for ages. The people the fax was being sent to phoned me and said, "You can stop sending the fax, we've got lots of copies", so I went to the fax room to investigate. There was my staff member, feeding the sheet of paper into the machine, keying in the number, hitting 'send', and when it was finished, repeating the process all over again. Turns out she'd never seen a fax machine before and had asked someone how to use it. She'd been told, "put the sheet in there, type in the number and hit start, and the message will go." Problem was, the machine kept giving her the message back - she'd expected it to disappear when it was sent.

Anyone else remember other old office tech, like daisy wheel printers, golf ball typewriters, wet-process copiers, and tape-based word processors?

edit: typo

[Scrummy Mummy]

I remember starting work in 1987 and being given a computer appreciation course. I'd done a law degree which had no IT impact at all. THe guy said "Switch on your PC" and I said "What's a PC?". Later my course-partner and I went to lunch and switched it off, not realising we had to save our work first.

Marginally (but only marginally) less clueless now ..........

[Kooky]

I first worked in 1979, for the County Council - the computers took up the whole of the dungeon underneath the Town Hall.

My first job after poly in 1983 - the VDUs we used were as deep as the desks, and the word processors didn't have hard disks.

[canuck]

man you lot are old

[Burbage]

Punch card programming?

My first computer was the Commodore 64. 64kb of memory. And a bit of ROM for the Commodore Basic. It was immense in those days.
The first computer I used in school was a Sharp PC. You had to load Basic from a tape before you could do anything. The VDU was the size of a postcard and the whole thing took up most of a table. It had about 28kb RAM I think.

[Aliya]

My first job was using a golf ball typewriter, I still love them!

And remember when fax machines came out, at drinks on a Friday night (in a NZ lawfirm these were always pretty over the top) people (generally the men) would photocopy their bottoms and we would fax it to another law firm, they would have to guess whose bottom it was. We had a very religious receptionist who resigned one Monday morning, it was her job to collate the faxes sent over the weekend and someone sent a fax of his boy bits, that was too much for her

Ah those were the days. I was sort of on the tail end of telex's, had to use one once before it was shut away in a cupboard, OMG freakin awful thing, really feel for Bender.

My first computer had the black screen with the white wording, it was so slow and clunked like nothing else but we thought it was wonderful! And then EMAILS, OMG, even more wonderful. And the NET! I remember going over to a friends place and trying to get on line, in those days only a certain amount of people could get online, you would have to wait, oh those were the days.

[canuck]

[Kooky]

Punch card programming?

Yup. I did Computer Studies at Redcar Tech (my school didn't do it) and we had to go on the train to Teesside Poly, nine miles away, to process them.

[BFG]

Don't get lippy small, caribou-snogging Candiduckling. You, too, will be old one day and then we'll all have the last laugh.

Well, actually, we won't. Cos we'll be dead. But you know what I mean....

By The way - I used punch cards on a mainframe for my main thesis at Uni....

[canuck]

bfg: no worries I am already old, just not near as old as you

[BFG]

How sharper than a vipers sting...

[canuck]

no vipers here

[Spike]

PAX being short for 'passenger'.

Anyone else remember other old office tech, like daisy wheel printers, golf ball typewriters, wet-process copiers, and tape-based word processors?

Dictaphones! When I was trolling round Africa and the Middle East flogging radio systems in the 70s/early 80s I used to do three week tours and usually take in 3 or 4 countries. I'd take my mini-tape dictaphone with me and voice record the salient points of that day's activities, which would take me about 20 minutes at the end of each day before hitting the hotel bar or local night spots (if there were any in the locale). When I got back at the end of the tour I'd just hand three or four full tapes to the typing pool and hey presto, by the afternoon I'd have a thumping great tour report to hand to the boss. I'd have to check them thoroughly though as I'd get some hilarious typos of technical terms and African names.

[BFG]

"Typing pools". My word....