Was there textspeak before texting?

Question

2b |! 2b, < = ?

With such a rich history of inventive writing and puns, it seemed bizarre to me that the idea of writing in txtspk would be a new one. I found a brief degree of truncation in telegram style, dating back 120 years, but I can't find any further history of people using the phonetic sounds of punctuation or numbers for humour, wit or any other reason.

Are cute pieces of wit such as '22' (tutu), ': imflam8ion' and so on unique to recent writers, or do they have a longer running history?

Edit: I can't believe I forgot l33tsp34k as @Kathryn points out in an answer below, but the original intent of my question was to find examples of these shortenings much older than the past few decades, if they exist.

Answer 1

OMG was used in a letter from Lord Fisher to Churchill in 1917. Smileys have been around for a while possibly as far back as 1862 if you believe some people. The use of the letter X to signify a kiss dates back to at least 1765.

So yes, there were lazy/economical letter writers long before SMS-speak.

Answer 2

Playing with language may be as old as language itself. When I was at school in the middle of the last century we saw things like YYURYYUBURYY4ME. Before that, the Victorians had fun with a thing called a rebus.

Answer 3

This kind of "speech" has been used on customized automobile ("vanity") license plates for as long as I can remember, like this:

(I'm not sure when the practice started, but I can attest that it's been going on for at least 40 years.)

In the 1970s, my aunt and uncle spotted a vehicle with the plate 10S·NE1. It took them about five miles or so to figure it out.

In any case, necessity is the mother of invention. In the same way it became a challenge to pack as much meaning as you could into the seven or eight allowed characters allowed on a license plate, so texters and tweeters sometimes aim to save space or time with similar typographical tricks. In other words, I suspect it's done partly for amusement, and partly for practical reasons.

Answer 4

Alfred Bester's novel The Demolished Man (1952) has characters called Wyg&, @kins and ¼Maine.

Answer 5

Yes, the current text speak is based on l33t (or 1337) speak. l33t speak began in the 1980s, when elite users received special privileges. Then in the 1990s, gamers used leet speak to chat with each other using text. Typos helped create new spellings such as "teh" for "the". But wanting to type faster and not lose game time led to abbreviations and l33t speak. The word "l33t" stands for "leet", which in turns is a phonetic representation of "elite". Only elite players knew the language and the substitutions, such as a 3 for the letter E, hence l33t speak.

For more details, see the Wikipedia article on Leet.