20 Years Of Texting: Happy Birthday SMS
Bangalore: SMS, the short message service, a revolution which gave a cheap and easy option for communication which included news, gossip, laughs, alerts, romances, blind dates, a new dialect and many more; turned 20 today.
The first SMS was sent on 3 December 1992 by a 22 year old British engineer Neil Papworth who used his computer to wish “Marry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Papaworth didn’t get a reply as Orbitel 901 had no option as ‘reply’ which was not conceived till Nokia’s first phone in 1993.
While dizzying number of options now exist, like Watsapp, BlackBerry Messenger, and whole brigade of messaging through cloud, for free texting, the SMS remains a 160 character deliverer which yet defiantly is preserving its some of old charms if not all, in the Smartphone era.
The first SMSs were free and could be sent between people on the same network. The Vodafone, then only other network in U.K in 1994, launched a share price alert system and with the coming of Tegic(T9) system in 1995 which was a predictive texting, flagged off the SMS revolution.
Commercial services soon followed but the operators hadn’t figured out how to charge for them, and when number of users grew many fold over the short time, they quickly realized huge opportunity in texting services.
SMS also led to creation of “text language” mainly for 160 character limit of because it was time consuming when the users wanted their SMSs for a quick fly. The abbreviations like “gr8” (great), “9t” (night), “FTF” (face to face) and many others became a norm in texting.
So “H-BDAY n LOL SMS” and let’s celebrate SMS’s 20th birthday.
Bangalore: SMS, the short message service, a revolution which gave a cheap and easy option for communication which included news, gossip, laughs, alerts, romances, blind dates, a new dialect and many more; turned 20 today. The first SMS was sent on 3 December 1992 by a 22 year old British engineer Neil Papworth who used his computer to wish “Marry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Papaworth didn’t get a reply as Orbitel 901 had no option as ‘reply’ which was not conceived till Nokia’s first phone in 1993.
While dizzying number of options now exist, like Watsapp, BlackBerry Messenger, and whole brigade of messaging through cloud, for free texting, the SMS remains a 160 character deliverer which yet defiantly is preserving its some of old charms if not all, in the Smartphone era.
The first SMSs were free and could be sent between people on the same network. The Vodafone, then only other network in U.K in 1994, launched a share price alert system and with the coming of Tegic(T9) system in 1995 which was a predictive texting, flagged off the SMS revolution.
Commercial services soon followed but the operators hadn’t figured out how to charge for them, and when number of users grew many fold over the short time, they quickly realized huge opportunity in texting services.
SMS also led to creation of “text language” mainly for 160 character limit of because it was time consuming when the users wanted their SMSs for a quick fly. The abbreviations like “gr8” (great), “9t” (night), “FTF” (face to face) and many others became a norm in texting.
So “H-BDAY n LOL SMS” and let’s celebrate SMS’s 20th birthday.
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