Deaf people also sort of used to send texts by rotary phone. Before cell phones were a thing deaf people who wanted to use the phone had to have a keyboard/display combo called a TTY that hooked up to the phone line. What they typed on the TTY went out to an operator that could hear, who passed on what was written to the hearing person that the deaf person was trying to call, and any replies from the hearing person were typed up and sent back to the deaf person’s TTY.

I think government services might still use TTY for the people who still have them, but that’s a job that has to have pretty much disappeared. I have to imagine some of them heard/said some wild shit, haha.