The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The practice began with the telegraph when charges were by character and brevity was desirable. It was holy grail by the Navy. Be brief in correspondnece....... not with abbrertiviations necessarily but with succinct writing. That too was the result of Morse encoded communications.
More recently, much business and all international business was conducted by telex. Telex was expensive but the only recourse. I still use the salutation rgds short for Regards or Best Regards in e mail.
The piece noted is the current generation picking up the old ways and even expanding them in text messags. The writer is illustrating a knowledge and mastery of current communications. Texting was hard and reduction of characters speeded the message. The new phones allow much easier typing but the old abbreviated way survives.
Then there were the hams. They communicated by Morse and developed a whole language of short cuts. The Q codes allowed a series of 3 characters to convey a message.
A couple of nights ago I was channel surfing and ran across a night show (Leno?) speed contest between Morse code hams and texters. The hams won hands down. Much faster than texting! The kids who were up against them were flabbergasted.
The current practice is from typing on very small keyboards to write text messages on phones. That and inventing new abbreviations so your parents won’t know what kids are texting.
Correct. Also remember in the early days of texting there was a character limit too (164? I cant remember) So thats why people abbreviated their words.