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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
In the rest of the world the sender pays the bill
Yes, "receiver pays" is an American thing. The reason is that at the very beginning mobile phones were overlaid on top of the existing phone system, with the same area codes, and it was impossible for a caller to know if they were calling a landline or a mobile. In America, this is mostly still true.
In most of the rest of the world, mobile phones have a different prefix, and often even a different number of digits. You can look at a phone number, and in a glance you can tell that it is a mobile number. So "caller pays" is reasonable. This is one reason that other countries have a lot less phone spam, and a lot less robo-calling.