[golergka]

In the 90s, before wide adoption of Unicode, there were several competing encodings for Russian in ASCII, such as KOI-8, Windows and others. In some cases, it was just easier to type Russian in English language as it was spoken, which was called "translit", from transliteration: naprimer, vot tak. Later, as first mobile phones got wide adoption in late 90s and early 00s, they, too, didn't yet have russian keyboards, and translit was once again used, although in modified form, with wider use of digits in place of letters.