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public_html/about.php

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+<?php
+require_once __DIR__ . '/lib/bootstrap.php';
+
+page_start('About', ['back' => '/index.php']);
+
+p_para('wap.txt3.net - a WAP site, on purpose, in ' . date('Y') . '.');
+p_rule();
+
+p_para('== Where this came from ==');
+p_para('txt3 has been sending text messages since the early 2000s. This site '
+     . 'is a deliberate throwback to how it started: a WML deck on a phone with '
+     . 'a two-inch screen.');
+
+p_rule();
+p_para('== Timeline ==');
+
+p_para('1997 - the txt3 story begins. The current site still carries the line '
+     . '"Connecting people - since 1997".');
+
+p_para('Aug 2002 - txt3.co.uk is first archived by the Internet Archive, making '
+     . 'it the oldest of the txt3 domains on record. txt3.com is captured a few '
+     . 'weeks later, in Sep 2002.');
+
+p_para('Jan 2003 - wap.txt3.co.uk appears: a WML 1.1 deck titled "FREE SMS", '
+     . 'with a .wbmp logo and Login / Sign Up / Statistics links. It was built '
+     . 'with WAPtor, the WAP authoring tool of the day. By this point '
+     . 'txt3.co.uk itself was just a 5-second meta-refresh pointing visitors '
+     . 'at txt3.com.');
+
+p_para('2004 - txt3.net joins the family and the WAP gateway moves with it. '
+     . 'The front deck proudly announces "Registration working 100%!" and links '
+     . 'to an "Access Denied?" help card.');
+
+p_para('Feb 2005 - wap.txt3.net is first archived, serving the same FREE SMS '
+     . 'deck under a txt3.net logo. Accounts were tied to your handset: change '
+     . 'phones and you had to text UNLOCK back to the service to reactivate. '
+     . 'The help card also allowed that you might simply have been "banned :)".');
+
+p_para('2008-2010 - wap.txt3.com is being passed around on mobile forums as a '
+     . 'free-SMS WAP site, including a 2008 thread on nairaland.com listing it '
+     . 'among "WAP sites you know".');
+
+p_para('2016 - the revival. txt3.net returns with the tagline "The original, '
+     . 'resurrected!" offering unlimited free replyable SMS to UK numbers, plus '
+     . 'SMS-to-email, email-to-SMS and bulk SMS, alongside a forum and a blog. '
+     . 'The announcement is signed simply "- JP".');
+
+p_para('2019 - still running, still fixing logins, still promising '
+     . 'international SMS "in the very near future".');
+
+p_para('2025 - txt3.com becomes a quieter landing page, pointing people at a '
+     . 'self-hosted Matrix server (mtx.txt3.net) for group chats, communities '
+     . 'and calls. The medium changed; the purpose did not.');
+
+p_para(date('Y') . ' - wap.txt3.net is reborn as this hybrid: the same site '
+     . 'rendered as WML 1.1 for period phones and XHTML for everything else, '
+     . 'plus a telnet BBS on port 12300 for anyone who prefers a terminal. '
+     . 'Forums, private mail, profiles and games are shared across all three '
+     . 'front-ends - one account, one database.');
+
+p_rule();
+p_para('== The domains ==');
+p_para('txt3.co.uk - first seen Aug 2002, last archived 2017.');
+p_para('txt3.com - first seen Sep 2002, still live today.');
+p_para('txt3.net - first seen Oct 2004, home of this site.');
+p_para('wap.txt3.co.uk - the original WAP deck, archived Jan-Mar 2003.');
+p_para('wap.txt3.com - archived 2009-2019.');
+p_para('wap.txt3.net - archived from Feb 2005, and running again now.');
+
+p_rule();
+p_para('== This site ==');
+p_para('One PHP codebase serves two markup languages. WML browsers are '
+     . 'detected from the Accept header, WAP gateway headers and user-agent, '
+     . 'and get valid WML 1.1 decks with softkeys and postfields; everyone else '
+     . 'gets XHTML. Data lives in SQLite. The BBS is a Python telnet daemon '
+     . 'reading the very same database, so a match started on a phone can be '
+     . 'finished from a terminal.');
+p_para('Use the link at the bottom of any page to switch markup by hand, or '
+     . 'add ?m=auto to go back to automatic detection.');
+
+p_rule();
+p_para('== A note on searching for us ==');
+p_para('Looking up "txt3" today is harder than it should be. The K-pop group '
+     . 'TOMORROW X TOGETHER (TXT), formed 2019, floods every search for TXT '
+     . 'forums, and there are unrelated outfits using similar names. Even AI '
+     . 'search tools confidently invent a history for this domain - complete '
+     . 'with projects it was never part of. The account above is drawn only '
+     . 'from archived copies of txt3\'s own pages.');
+
+p_rule();
+p_para('Sources: Internet Archive Wayback Machine captures of txt3.co.uk, '
+     . 'txt3.com, txt3.net and their wap. subdomains (2002-2026), and archived '
+     . 'copies of the sites\' own pages.');
+
+p_links([['/index.php', 'Home'], ['/forum.php', 'Forum']]);
+page_end();