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In no way was SMS free across all of Europe. It also depended on your plan, the cheaper the plan, the less freebies you had and parents never got their kids th
by ChuckNorris89 6y ago
In no way was SMS free across all of Europe.
It also depended on your plan, the cheaper the plan, the less freebies you had and parents never got their kids the top spec plan. My parents only got me a cell-phone with a pre-paid SIM for "emergencies" and didn't have enough credit on it to text too many people so IM over yahoo! messenger on the PC was used by teens for chatting at the time.
Growing up in Eastern Europe with a basic cell-phone plan, before the days of all you can talk/text, it was common to "beep"[1] people when you were on a prepaid SIM and had little or no credit on it.
[1]Calling someone and quickly hanging up after hearing the phone "ring" or "beep", and hope the person on the other end heard it and cares enough about you to spend their dime calling you back. It was also a sign of stinginess/poverty if you did this but it was very popular due to the high cost and low wages at the time.
- sn_master 6y agoThe same thing was possible with PCs too! All the way to Windows XP, there was a built-in dial program (HyperTerminal) that let you send files and chat over the phone line directly, outside the Internet, and only the person initiating the connection would be the one paying, since it was fundamentally just a phone call. It was also awesome because it bypassed the Internet. It could work if you were censored, didn't have an ISP or if the Internet was completely shutdown (I used it for exactly that when Egypt shutdown the Internet in Jan 2011). https://scintrexltd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Data-Transfer-Using-HyperTerminal.pdf https://scintrexltd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Data-Tran... https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-in/0596009003/re102.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-in/059600900...