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Texting Is 25 Years Old (cnet.com)
Readers share a report: The first text message was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, an executive at British telecom Vodafone. Typed out on a PC, it was sent to Jarvis's Orbitel 901, a mobile phone that would take up most of your laptop backpack. Although Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, he's not the so-called father of SMS. That honor falls on Matti Makkonen, who initially suggested the idea back in 1984 at a telecommunications conference. But texting didn't take off over night. First it had to be incorporated into the then-budding GSM standard. Today, about 97 percent of smartphone owners use text messaging, according to Pew Research, and along the way, a new set of sub-languages based on abbreviations and keyboard-based imagery has evolved.
You're either too young or too dense to remember a time when loudmouths with mobile phones roamed the earth.
I'll take 10,000 silent smartphone zombies over one loud motherfucker any day of the week...
True and somewhat insightful. However after having been rear ended by one a few years back and watching the horror show on the road with cell phones these days it would be far better if there was a driving block on cell towers signal that can only be overridden by signaling a disclaimer that you are a passenger not a fucking driver and that includes bicycle couriers and the like. Of course I can hear the howls of derision of this suggestion but if you kill someone while using a cell phone while driving you should be charged with the exact same charge as impaired driving.
It is sad when you see young parents in their cars with children using a cell phone behind the wheel and socially this kind of murderously stupid suicidal behavior must stop.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
When digital phone networks were first introduced in Asia, texting was included for free. The messages are sent over the same bandwidth that's used to ring your phone when you get a call. Since there's rarely an incoming call at any given time, that leaves a lot of free bandwidth. So the carriers figured might as well use it for something. And since it didn't cost them anything to provide, they just threw it in as a freebie. So text messaging ended up being free in Asia and Europe.
The U.S. had an extensive and functional analog cellular network, and that inertia made it slower to switch over to a digital cellular network. That gave the carriers time to see what features were popular in the rest of the world. That's how we ended up with 99 cent ringtones and 15 cent text messages - things that cost the carriers almost nothing to supply. There was no genius involved, only greed. If there had been more competition, prices would've dropped quicker. But alas putting together a cellular network is not a trivial task. There were only a half dozen or so carriers (true carriers, not MVNOs), and all of them decided to overcharge for texts. Still, two decades of what little competition there is has driven text prices down close to what they cost to provide - almost zero.