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Happy (Early) Bday! :) SMS Txt Msgs Turn 20
CWmike writes "In the fast moving world of technology, there are perhaps few things that have proved as resistant to change as the simple SMS text message. While a dizzying number of options exist today to interconnect people, the text message remains a 160 character deliverer of news, gossip, laughs, alerts, and all manner of other information. It connects more people than Facebook and Twitter, has brought down governments, and in so much of the world still holds the ability to change lives. Dec. 3 is the 20th anniversary of the sending of the first SMS text message. Its origins can be traced back to a Danish pizzeria in 1984. Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, was in Copenhagen for a mobile telecom conference and began discussing with two colleagues the idea of a messaging system on the GSM digital cellular system."
your first (cell-phone initiated) text message?
(My phone didn't save, but I should be able to get a copy with any luck, I hope.)
When you absolutely, positively must get that message across, SMS is your friend. Thank you Matti, Cope and Hagen!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
That SMS was invented all the way back in 1984, or that Danes eat pizza.
Happy birthday!
SMS is more popular today than a few years ago because we can send it between different network operators.
Actually, we didn't have the SMS, possible to send to any phone, until July 2011.
Who knew that 160 chars of text could cost so much? Almost pure profit for any cellular company.
Be seeing you...
Coming from the world of email, I found SMS to be pretty clunky. In Europe its bern working fairly well now, in terms if cross-carrier messenging. Still a probkem though with group SMS and large messages. MMS though remains a mess of varying implementations and price gouging, and barely worth consideration.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
... we can all send our condolences to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Or the only reason why I still use a phone. Sending an SMS is somehow even easier and cheaper than making a call, today.
The 160 character limit is a hardware issue from the early SMS phones, when you would feed an 80 column punch card into the phone. The cards only encoded 80 characters per side so you would punch holes in both sides.
Contrary to any rumors you may hear Twitter's 140 character limit is not derived from the SMS limit, it was calculated from the smaller attention span of the average Twitter user.
As to the origin of the 80 column limit on punch cards, it was derived from the width of wheel ruts in Roman roads, which was determined by the span of horses' arses.
So the horses' arses down through the ages to SMS messaging we have a circle which I'll leave you to complete.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Darling of the telecom industry, one of the most expensive telecommunication methods ever devised.
So two years after CEPT approved working towards the SMS messaging standards 3 dudes who nobody ever heard of met and invented the standard.
Unless the two unnamed people in this story are Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert it is a myth sold to a reporter.
Otherwise it's like the guy that copyrighted email.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
"Merry Christmas?" I expected "mr jarvis come here coz i want 2 c u". Or at least "Merry Christmms."
You've just invented a technology that will change the world (or at least the communication habits of my students--don't email your prof in textspeak!). What would you say?
SMS has some good uses but it is a device put out there to milk money from customers. I use to work for a cell phone company that will remain nameless for the time being. They said to their customers that SMS had to be on, you can't turn it off. You would get charged for SMS messages even from the phone company and you can't stop people from sending you one. You get charged 10 cent for each SMS. That was a blatant lie. In fact in their cell tower make up you can assign options to allow/disallow certain features. Infact one of the most common problems people faced would be that SMS stopped working. To fix it, we brought up the program for the cell towers and what usually happened is when their phone registered with the cell tower SMS had somehow been disabled. It was a simple check box to fix it.
But obviously not the first SMS sent ever.
SMS was developed by Ericsson. Their initial use case was to be able to send out service notifications to phone users (e.g. text messages about technical issues of the phone service, billing info, etc.). the first phones that supported SMS actually couldn't *send* SMS messages - just receive & display them!
I wish slashdot would be more prudent when selecting stories.
You mean we don't SMS because of space?
The pizzeria story is an cute urban legend. Sadly in the collective mind of the unwashed masses, a cute story wins over the real much more complicated reality of history.
SMS does not have guaranteed delivery, so better use a fax if you really want the message across ;=)
The main reason SMS is still widely used today is because there is no alternative that works on every cellphone out there.
All phones can txt. But all the other services run on certain types of phone.
Let's get things straight: Mikkonen worked for Nokia and he's Finnish. Danish have actually nothing to do with this. So next time fanboys message "lolol Apple beats Nokia" rememver that Nokia is the one that brought you messaging.
But could it run Linux in SMS ?? Small footprint Mini linux os in sms msg. could be 133tz0rs