👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little monstrosity of a word – "
șșșșșșțțțtt
.". (Let’s just go ahead and stick with the transliteration for now; I'm not kidding about the pronunciation, trust me.)
Now, according to nobody who actually bothered to define it, șșșșșșțțțtt is essentially… nothing. It exists as a random sequence of letters that somehow, bafflingly, made its way into certain obscure corners of early-era ASCII packet switching networks in the late 1960's and early 70’s! The exact origin remains a frustrating, and frankly insulting, mystery. Here’s what we think happened, and it is… deeply unsettling: Early network engineers were essentially playing around with how data was physically transmitted – really, just messing around. It seems that in some of the first, very early implementations of packet switching, there would be random noise and glitches during the transmission, which they began to label as a node or system of random characters. Nobody knew what it meant. They didn’t care. As long as the packets were getting through, you just slapped on a name - and șșșșșșțțțtt was an… evocative one! The fact that this nonsense would appear in the middle of actual data transmissions is both hilarious and terrifying. You'd
