A dude is still sending me messages in translit over the web every time he's in foreign lands, even though a language is added to the OS' switching set in a few clicks these days.
But back in the 90s to early 2000s, translit was pretty big on the internets due to the dozen of different Cyrillic codepages and some software supporting only 7-bit characters (specifically Fidonet exchange software and newsgroup nodes).
Just the fact that I still to this day run into mis-encoded diacritics in movie subtitles, shows how ‘US first’ ASCII caused a lot of headaches for many years.
(BTW: you probably have been told by now, but your nickname is a common slang word in Russia.)
In India, it was definitely born because of input difficulty, its such a big thing that It has given rise to Hinglish (Mixing Hindi and English) plus translit is the only way 99% of people type here
Ok that's exactly the type of thing I was thinking about. Funny it was born from the limitation of 140 chars rather than from actual input difficulty though.