“I 1der if you got that 1 I wrote 2U B4.” The note sounds like a text message exchanging between teenagers. In fact, it was written some 130 years before the arrival of the written language seen on mobile phone screens.
According to a forthcoming exhibition at the British Library, Victorian writers already used abbreviations typical of textspeak.
As reported by "The Guardian", the London exhibit will display a poem printed in 1867 which features a number of acronyms and abbreviations -- the same used today when trying to overcome the standard 160-character limit of texting.
Called emblematic poetry, the Victorian writing style combined letters, numbers and logograms. An example is the "Essay to Miss Catharine Jay", or better, "An S A 2 Miss K T J."
Taken from Charles Carroll Bombaugh's Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, the poem on display at the British Library exhibit, is filled with proto-text-speak expressions, such as "I wrote 2U B4" or "he says he love U2."
Other verses are more complex : "And 1st should NE NVU,/ B EZ, mind it not, /Should NE friendship show, B true:/ They should not B forgot. " (translation: And first should any envy you / be easy, mind it not, /Should any friendship show, be true:/ They should not be forgot).
The "S A 2 Miss K T J," however, wasn’t Bombaugh's own work. As Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Visual Thesaurus notes in the online magazine, similar essays to various lovely Miss Catharine Jay abounded in American publications at least since 1832.
In England Ellen Gee of Kew and her cousin Emily Kay of Ewell were already starring in tragicomic verses. Filled with dozens of SMS-looking examples, the elegies were published in 1828 in the London-based New Monthly Magazine.
Mourning LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew) the author complained that "never again shall I and U/ together sip our T (never again shall I and you/ together sip our tea ), while MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell) was remembered "with tearful I" (with tearful eye) in an "MT LEG" (empty elegy).
Indeed, the mobile phone language isn't new at all, according to linguistics expert David Crystal.
"People have been initializing common phrases for ages... IOU [An abbreviation of the phrase "I owe you" ] is known from 1618," Crystal wrote in Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, (Texting: The Great Debate), a book on the SMS lingo.
Basically, there is no difference between a modern Twitter's "RTHX ("Thank you for the Retweet") and a "SWALK" ("sealed with a loving kiss") from Second World War letters.

Analysis by Rossella Lorenzi
https://news.discovery.com/

Beyond the Black Box
Instead of storing flight data on board, aircraft could easily send the information in real time to the ground.
GOO IDEA! Ana ....
One of the Best Inventions in Safety Engineering
For half a century, every commercial airplane in the world has been equipped with one of these rugged, reinforced, waterproof boxes, which each house a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder. For hundreds of crashes, they have given investigators the often heartbreaking details of the plane's demise: the pilot's frantic last words, his second-by-second struggles to keep the plane airborne, and the readings of the gauges and sensors that reveal such key parameters as the airspeed, altitude and the state of the plane's engines and flight-control surfaces. Such information has enabled analysts to infer the causes of most crashes and, often, to come up with preventive measures that have saved thousands of lives.
Every now and then, though, a black box is destroyed, lost beyond all chance of recovery or, as in the case of Air France 447, beyond all chance of detection. Lacking the black box and its precious data, we have no way to tell whether the last problem reported was the cause of the crash, the result of a deeper problem, or just an artifact of the sensor system on board. And because we can't pinpoint the cause of the crash, we can take no steps to prevent similar failures in the future.
The black box may be the greatest single invention in the history of safety engineering. Nevertheless, technology has moved on, and we can -- we must -- improve on it. Rather than store data in an onboard box that might be unrecoverable if the aircraft goes down in the sea, it would be far better to transmit the data continuously and in real time to a ground-based system that would record the output of the plane's sensors and electronics. In the event of unusual behavior, such a system could even automatically request additional information. It could also preserve data from many aircraft, over many flights and many years, and mine this information with sophisticated algorithms to identify the signs of recurring problems.
I envisage a glass box, that is, a system that would be transparent because it would be in the cloud -- not a cottony puff in the sky but rather the network of servers and databases that covers ever more of the world every day. The system would offer ubiquity, invulnerability, unlimited storage, and unparalleled powers of search.
Consider how the glass box might have been of use in the more recent incident of Northwest Flight 188. While en route to Minneapolis from San Diego on 21 October 2009, it flew past its intended destination and maintained radio silence for nearly 80 minutes. There was no crash, although air-traffic controllers and safety officials were nearly frantic by the time the plane landed. Had flight data been transmitted continuously, ground-based monitors could have quickly alerted controllers that the autopilot was still engaged and that the plane remained at high altitude when the pilots ought to have been taking command and preparing to land. The controllers could then have radioed the pilots immediately.
https://news.discovery.com/tech/beyond-the-black-box.html