Recycling an old mobile phone, I came across this guide to texting (still called ‘text messaging’) from a BT Cellnet guide dated November 2000.
Some of the abbreviations seem to have stayed the course, but several now mean nothing to my 22-year-old son David, a prodigious user of Skype, AIM, etc., as well as SMS. On the other hand, a Google search seems to turn up most of them. Did BT Cellnet attempt to research usage in 2000? Is predictive text removing the need for such telegraphese?