Lady @Lady@cat.family

i think they just did not know the canon ages which makes sense for something written in 2013

for clarity i am not doing this i just came across a fanfic which did this and i am like “ok”

[lists their canon ages]

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@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"

@Satsuma @gaditb also pokémon can communicate back using it

@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

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

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

@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 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

@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 (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>)

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

@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)

@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

@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)

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

@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)