21 April—History was made 19 years ago today in New York City when 13-year-old junior high school pupil Morgan Pozgar of minuscule Claysburg, Pennsylvania, won the $25,000 grand prize in the very first LG National Texting Championship by typing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious” in 15 seconds, presumably without a single typo. (It takes 10 seconds to speak it, even without stuttering.)

Defeating some 200 presumably competitive texters with less adroit fingers, Morgan accomplished her amazing feat by flying over real—but very small—keys (rather than a virtual keyboard) on her dual-face Verizon LG VX 9900 enV flip phone, said to have been designed specifically for texting addicts and others who wanted a physical QWERTY keyboard. Those phones were awarded as prizes at various stages of the competition, by the way.

After her stunning victory, Morgan told incredulous admirers in all seriousness that she sent an incredible 8,000 text messages—at least—a month to her friends and family. You wonder why. So that would work out to about 266 texts a day. You wonder how long the texts were and what they could possibly have been about.

Assuming she slept eight hours a night (without texting), then, Morgan would have been averaging some 16 texts in a waking hour. But she’d probably have been doing other things that would have precluded texting. So go figure. In all events, it’s no wonder that she’d perfected her digital prowess. But didn’t the kid have a life?

You’ve got to feel a little sorry for poor Morgan Pozgar because LG doubled the texting grand prize to $50,000 the next year, 2008. And Nathan Schwartz, a college student from Ohio, won it by typing—also on an LG enV flip phone, by the way—“Does everybody here know the alphabet? Let’s text. Here it goes … AbcDeFghiJKlmNoPQrStuvWXy & Z! Now I know my A-B-C’s, next time won’t you text with me?” in less than a minute. With no mistakes, of course. How much less than a minute? We wonder, too. But Morgan probably could have done it in 15 seconds.

LG discontinued its National Texting Championship in 2012 because it had been designed to highlight—i.e., promote—phones with physical keyboards and those were being superseded—sadly—by virtual keyboards on smartphones.

Remember real keys on your cellphone? Remember plain old-fashioned talking on your cellphone? Remember life before your cellphone?