this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Pre-smartphone was a very different time.
There were literally phone numbers you could call and someone at a library would look up the answer to your question. In like, a day or so. And call you back with the info.
We texted Chacha (242242) when I was in high school. It just sent the question to some dude on their computer who looked up the answer and texted you back. I still have no idea how they made money.
That's the neat part, they didn't.
They wanted to pivot to ads, or paid subscriptions, but neither revenue stream really materialized for them.
Google had a text to search service, too, that didn't make money, but turned out to be pretty valuable user data for developing smarter semantic search.