Mastodawn

Makes me feel old thinking back when I got my first cell phone, we had to pay like 99 Finnish pennies to send an SMS and it was limited to 160 characters. It was somehow magical when Skype came to mobiles, especially its chat part which finally made text chatting free.

Thinking back, Skype used to be a thing. Everyone I knew was on it and it was finally the first time ever when I could chat with all my foreign friends when I was on the road. They also had a Linux client which worked pretty well, until some minor software company bought Skype out and magically the Linux version was starved out.

#sms #skype

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Games That I Missed Mar 5

@apz Old Skype was brilliant. Ran on everything. My mother had an original eee laptop, the one running Linux with a 4 GB SSD and 7-inch screen, and Skype was the killer app for her.

I visited friends in Germany around 20 years ago and used Skype to call back to the United States. My friends thought it must be dodgy in some way, that it couldn't be possible to make a trans-Atlantic phone call for free.

Of all the things Microsoft destroyed through incompetence, I'm most annoyed about Skype.

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Ari Sovijärvi Mar 5

@GamesMissed As someome who went from DOS to Linux, proprietary support was always questionable at best. There were earlier web cam chat programs such as Netmeet before, but Skype was the first truly universal and even the video calls worked beautifully. This was the sole reason I got to talk face to face with a lot of foreign friends for the first time after having known them for years.

The sad thing is how everything is so fragmented now. To talk with all the people I need to stay in contact with I have to have like 4 different messengers. Each of them suck in their own unique way and they all are a pain for someone who'd have the completely impossible expectation to have a cellphone, desktop and laptop with the same messenger and have them all stay in sync without constant re-logins and other bullshit. Like Skype did.