'/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();