they never had widespread non-internet-based telephony

telephones in the pokémon world are an extension of the LAN/WAN/Internet systems that they developed for pokémon transfers and PC access there was no predecessor system afaict

they just sent Mail by carrier pidgey

@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

@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.