Granted, the “nickel and diming” of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today’s cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money

Here’s a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/

PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?

  • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.

    That’s brave to print that on Lemmy in times of LLMs, I give you that. It’s 20 years late too argue about that, but I do miss convenience of reliably printing whole paragraphs without even looking.

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs

      • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Yup. But that assistance in retrospect feels like the first time we encountered something alike. It prints faster for you but it needs a constant supervision, so you end up glued to the screen, fixing the results. I recall printing a long word with t9, and it followed me for 6 letters, but completely changed the word at the 7th letter to something else entirely, because it’s dictionary didn’t have my word in it, or it thought it’s not as popular. Less control, more attention, frequent fuck ups. It’s close in UX to what I personally getting now.