You mean the days when people had their conversations in person or written on paper? Nothing's preventing you from favouring that form of communication if you prefer it. You choose to participate in online forums. Price of admission.
Abbreviations for online forums go back way before the internet was a "thing." It was around of course, but only the government used it. The rest of us would login to a BBS with our ULTRA FAST 2400 baud modems and do basically what we do here. But slower. Because a 2400 baud modem wasn't actually remotely fast, never mind ultra. You paid attention to each and every character you wrote. They downloaded so slow you could actually see the individual letters downloading. 2400 bits per second, 8 bits per letter. Of course, that's the maximum speed of the modem, not accounting for latency because the other computer was on the other side of the country, or the fact that it was running on a desktop with a whopping 512 kB RAM in some guy's basement. And of course, you may or may not have been paying long-distance charges to call that computer on the other side of the country.
With cell phones what they are today, teenagers think they invented this shit. lol. That means "laughing out loud" btw.
Yeah, thread derailed. But it's a thread about smoking weed. You don't expect that to remain clear and focused, do you?
Yehaw, that was a fast bbs service .. I ran my first bbs on a 286 with a micro co-processor so I had improved math calculations.. I had an OLD 45meg MFD hard drive in it (the large ones that look like small clocks) ahah my first BBS "experience" was with the old phone literally plugged into the modem.. the first bbs I ran was dual modem 1200.. SMOKING fast. ..
Thanks for the nostalgia.. still hate aolese but it did and does have its place. (take a step back and really how different is it then shorthand... *shrugs* )