the rotom phone is an iteration on the smartphones in alola which is an iteration on the Xtranceiver which is an iteration on the pokégear which is an iteration on the pokénav which was a GPS device which also just happened to have communication capabilities

@Lady this seems implausible

@Satsuma why do you say so

@Satsuma are you incapable of imagining a modernity without telephones

@Lady telegraph actually

@Satsuma why

@Lady sending a live thing digitally is insanely complex and it seems unlikely that, even if it was ones top cultural priority, it would get invented before the ability to send any data even if the latter was not particularly widely implemented

@Satsuma i'm not saying pokémon teleportation precedes email but i don't think email necessitates telegraph

@Satsuma (i do think they did not have Internet until after pokémon teleportation though, although this might just be a coincidence due to pokémon teleportation being invented early enough that there weren't many other good usecases for the internet yet)

(like if your friend lives in a different region you can just write a letter and accept it might be a little while before you hear back, but there is no way to send them a pokémon except with a global internet connection or something like it, short of paying someone to literally bring them the pokémon)

@Satsuma (so what you had initially canonically were these transfer labs or global communication centers which had a trans-regional link and then the problem was cutting out the middleman, which took them a while as they didn't have a pre·existing international telephony system to crib off of)

@Lady email is another reasonable predecessor technology and i’d also believe that lack of interest meant there wasn’t widespread the infrastructural accommodation necessary for a full telephone/internet/wired data network prior to teleporting pokemons

@Satsuma @Lady They do have radio.

Potentially the system only works by broadcast (including rebroadcast networks?), or at least unicast/multicast if it exists at all was only developed much later (e.g. to handle signal congestion from larger amounts of users)?

@Satsuma @Lady !!

The system being broadcast-based is why it is possible to fly to pokemon centers, which are all broadcast nodes.

It All Makes Sense™.

@Satsuma @Lady WAIT how does the Network Machine (from FR/LG) play into this!?

@gaditb @Satsuma Kanto uses Silph boxes and Hoenn uses Devon boxes and there are regional WANs but no protocol for communicating between them / which is compatible with both systems

that's the beginnings of the pokémon internet and probably one of the first routers

@gaditb @Satsuma so first they connect Sevii to Kanto, which is Silph-Silph, to see that it works (and avoid messy protocol specifications for conveying commands across systems) and then they connect Sevii to Hoenn, Silph-Devon, which requires protocol standardization for the whole transfer process on the host-router interface

@Lady @Satsuma Calling it a router presumes their network has been built up from unicast connections, though. (And I agree with Satsuma -- we'd expect more simple forms of unicast technologies first.)

I still think my "broadcast as a basic unit" theory deserves at least some consideration. (We see radio/TV, positioning systems, ... I think we have evidence for it.)

In that frame, it's an amplifier/rebroadcaster -- possibly, reencoding as well.

@gaditb @Satsuma the thing that makes me think it is somewhat real-world-like infrastructurally is the fact that you can also access your own PC from the pokémon center… and get personalized pokédex evaluations from professor oak’s… this to me suggests a wired connection built up from the timesharing/remote execution networks which were required for early computers to be practical anyway

so like what i'm imagining on the regional level is something like UUCP networks where pokémon centers serve as well-known nodes that trainers can register with (possibly by trainer ID?). but the problem then is that those are operating system-specific and don't have global addressing (although pokémon center–based networking is already close to DNS), which makes bridging regional networks hard

@gaditb @Satsuma like you can literally just TELNET into your PC from any pokémon center right??

@gaditb @Satsuma (except not telnet because it's probably not happening over TCP/IP)

@Satsuma (and i'm not opposed to saying that the pokémon had telegraph; what they didn't have is giant telephone exchanges routing calls to individual households)

@Lady Hold on, this doesn't add up. The telephone communication devices in pokemon games are universally SEPARATE from the pokemon/item transfer/storage devices.

Telephony was built off of the /GPS/ system, not the computer/internet/cloud-storage system.

@gaditb in the early games yes but they weren't called phones

the first device called a phone is the Rotom Phone, and those games do have remote box access

i’m drawing significantly off of the anime here though, where the videotelephony systems used in pokémon centers are i think pretty clearly on the same network as the transfer system

@gaditb (but yes you might say there were two separate telephony networks, neither of which are pre-computing or necessarily look much like ours, which converged sometime in the 2010s)

@Lady Ooh, I don't know the anime. That does sound reasonable, based on that.

(Possibly video calls, based in pokecenters, were built on the transfer network, while non-location-based audio was a newer invention and had to be built ad-hoc, slowly increasing in data capacity from minimal?)

@gaditb yes i think this is entirely reasonable and this is why i want to read pokémon world RFCs

@Lady "Hey just asking for an update on the status of the new error-correction algorithms RFC? It looks almost done, and last I heard a month ago was just waiting on finishing touches, but--?"
"Oh no, yeah, Bill transformed himself into a Pokemon again. He's better now; it'll be done within the week."
"OH MY GOD BILL HOW MANY TIMES IS THIS."

@gaditb (out of universe the reason the anime has videotelephony in the 90s is because it looks better for ash to be talking to oak on a screen than just speaking into a telephone)

(image of what those devices looked like in DP although they've been around since the beginning: <https://archives.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:Dawn_Johanna_videophone.png>)

@Lady @gaditb clearly evidence of a population that puts a high value on signed languages

@Satsuma @Lady Pretty dangerous for such a society to have an "if we make eye contact, we fight" cultural norm, then.

@gaditb @Lady the if we make eye contact we fight cultural norm might have derived from the meaning of eye contact in local signed languages!

@Satsuma @gaditb it wouldn't surprise me if pokémon trainers used a sign language to communicate as screaming into the forest is not great for catching pokémon

@Satsuma @gaditb also pokémon can communicate back using it

@Satsuma @gaditb like the emphasis on videotelephony might just be "if i can't see my pikachu i have no fucking clue what pika pika is supposed to mean"

@Lady *pretentious philosopher voice* The political/power implications of this difference in technology-implementation (as compared to, e.g., IP-based SIP telephony) are obvious.