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Intentional or not, WAP (Wiresless Application Protocol) was a real protocol that allowed you to surf the web on a cellphone in the late 90s/early 20s, before 3G was a thing. Most websites (or wapsites) were super barebones and relatively fast for me, and you could find interesting stuff like cracked .jars of popular games or of course, porn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol



To be fair, with the current web bloat, wap sites were faster to open than many todays sites, even on 5G.


I remember using and WAP2IRC gateway to impress my IRC buddies.


They had to be barebones. WAP only supported text and tiny black and white (no greyscale) images. I did some WAP sites and it was pretty horrible to work with even back then. The phone I used (Nokia 7110) didn't even support GPRS so you had to make a call at 9600 baud and pay per minute so you didn't want to hang around either.

The Japanese had i.mode which was much more powerful. They tried to introduce it in Europe but by then the smartphone was already coming.




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