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Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#81

Post by jansommer »

roywashere wrote: post #75
jeroenhd wrote: post #21

IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course. So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

That is nice but with 'unlimited' SMS will probably get you throttled quickly. I think OP might be better off with custom SMS integrations, lets say an RSS to SMS notification service for their fav news site that would send the article titles as individual sms messages and would allow requesting the 'full' article by means of an SMS reply I know Twilio has a nice SDK for building solutions like that

Re: Twilio, just created an account a few days ago. Super simple API, and had receiving texts and robocalling myself with their content running within an hour or so. You don't have to store texts on your own, query Twilio's logs and they're all there.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#83

Post by msoucy »

coldsauce wrote: post #24

In 2014, I had a similar problem so I created Cosmos Browser, an Android based internet browser which allowed people to connect to the internet via SMS. It's pretty much dead now, but wouldn't take a lot of work to revive it if you really wanted to. https://github.com/ColdSauce/CosmosBrowserAndroid

"Oh man I knew someone in college who made a project EXACTLY for this purpose!" ... "Oh wow this project seems familiar..." ... "Oh wait that's the same person."

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#84

Post by justsomehnguy »

jeroenhd wrote: post #21

IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course. So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

> Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN

Thanks for the laugh.

But your point is a valid, OP would have a better experience using even something like RFC 1149.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#85

Post by gunfighthacksaw »

dashundchen wrote: post #31

Not that this is a solution for you now, but about 10-15 years ago there were a whole slew of SMS services which were super useful for those without data. Google 311 (EDIT: actually it was Google 411) let you conduct full searches, local listings, full text turn-by-turn navigation, weather, movie listings etc. You could also call a number and do an voice search that would text you back the results. Twitter, AIM, Face…

> You could get useful services sent to your phone and not get sucked in endless feed scrolling.

Technology as it should be! Do you think the browser UI dominance was marketing, convenience, something more sinister…?

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#87

Post by Spare_account »

PaulHoule wrote: post #66
kurthr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might also see if you can just restrict interaction to a shell. That's definitely going to be much lower bandwidth (and thus more responsive). Then anything you can do in the shell, you can do through SMS. Updating an 80col screen isn't a completely unreasonable number of messages... especially if you're doing compression. Security is probably a bigger issue.

Couldn’t that blow up your phone? I could cat a million line file and it would take some time before I could do the equivalent of ctrl-c or close session.

The agent running on the remote machine would need to be aware of this issue and filter out long responses.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#88

Post by nickdothutton »

When SMS was first introduced it type UK, it was free at least for some carriers (Orange). Data was a traditional mobile phone call and therefore very expensive (we are talking even pre-GPRS, it was WAP or nothing so far as I recall). There were some IP-over SMS projects.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#89

Post by zoomablemind »

Back in the days of the growing spread of mobile comms, there was a convenience of email-SMS gateways. One could send an email, which would then be delivered as SMS messages onto the mobile.

If that's the case for you, then at least the delivery to your mobile may be simplified. Your remote systems may just schedule the sending/forwarding of the whatever textual data via email corresp. to your mobile address.

As for the reverse direction, there needs to be some gateway on your remote end to proces the incoming SMS and forward these correspondingly.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

#90

Post by kkfx »

IMVHO: you can base64-encode anything so any "REPL-alike system" (classic CLI included) can run over SMS BUT it would be probably less expensive buying a satellite connection for boats (C or Ka band) and relevant hw...

Just to check news a classic radio, or again in many area of the world a satellite dish for C or Ku bands works far better, emails might be more problematic for html messages, having at home a small server that pipe a classic mail (1) UI over SMS is easy but html2text converted mails are generally not good. Status check I do not know how much can be useful: you can know that's something goes wrong but you can't do almost anything so...

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