Today I went to the old creek by my place and found an old flip-phone from the 90's with a hashtag on it. Why is this?

Question

Twitter wasn't invented back then so why would they need the hashtag?

Answer 1

Troll smarter not harder.

Answer 2

Is that dawsons creek?

Answer 3

Because it wasn’t a hashtag before.

Answer 4

the sign #, representing a pound as a unit of weight or mass, or as represented on a telephone keypad or computer keyboard.

Answer 5

The "hashtag" (#) was in use as the numeral symbol in North America in the 1950s, and probably much earlier. I believe it was called the octothorpe or pound sign in North America.

My father's typewriter in Britain in the 1950s had that sign but I did not know what it was for until I found the American connection in 1956. The normal word in Britain was "hash" (no "tag") in various computer uses in the 1980s, until it was taken for use by Twitter and called "hashtag".

In Britain the numeral sign is "No.", e.g. "No.4", not "#4" as in the USA.

Answer 6

Looooooooong before # was called a "hashtag" it was called a "number sign." Why? Because it meant "number."

So we'd see #12345 as input to the phone which meant "numbers to follow" and then the 12345. Even today, I have a gate (for a gated community) where the code to open the gate is #1234 where the # means numbers to follow.

Also looooooooooooong before it was a hashtag # also meant pounds. So we'd see 70# instead of 70 lbs in text. And to a point the old typewriter QWERTY keyboard (look it up and learn something) had # for one of its keys. And they had typewriters back in the 1800s.

Answer 7

Because it's also called the number and pound sign and has been around supposedly since at least the mid 1800s, long before Twitter culture found another use for it.

Answer 8

If it's a Motorola that's mine . I'd like it back .

Answer 9

Aliens did it.....

Answer 10

Old phones still work don't they? LOL