Man Who Sent World's First Text Message 25 Years Ago
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Less amazing is how long it took to take off once it did arrive: cost model. Calling a mobile was quite expensive in Europe, so SMS was a big money saver. While in the US calling a mobile costs the same as calling any other number (you pay, or perhaps "paid" these days, for the privilege of having your phone number on a limited-capacity radio device rather than connected to a pair of wires).
On the cost front, this isn't a flame about Europe-vs-US. But until the iPhone utterly reconfigured the mobile market, the US was a mobile backwater. I really think the cost structure and lack of competition was the reason.
It took off when interconnect was sorted.
But nice trick was to set a foreign SMSC, this not only enabled you to send SMS to other UK networks, but also didn't charge you. Circa 1998 era.
I even remember in my sixth-form, in 1995/1996 one guy did a presentation for his physics assignment about how using a mobile fried your brain, and the richer (middle-class) kids all had one by then.
So this isn't true at all, within 2/3 years it was becoming main-stream in the UK.
I still remember in the early 2000s Americans in their TV shows were all about pagers, which never really took off in the UK, and it was like they lived in a totally different world, communication wise.
The iPhone was an evolution not a revolution.
Here's a chart, population of US is 320M: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Annual_C...
The T-Mobile Sidekick might want to argue with that point. Though not focused on pure SMS, mobile messaging was most certainly popular.
(And arguments about the Sidekick not being real SMS will run into arguments that with iPhone users tend towards iMessage, which is not pure SMS!)
It’s the disparity between how popular texting was in Europe compared to the US before the iPhone became popular. Texting didn’t permeate American culture the same way it did in the EU in the late nineties/early noughts
https://www.statista.com/statistics/215776/mobile-messaging-...
It's correct, texting in the US exploded with the modern smartphone. A four fold increase from 2007 to 2011. That said, it's not easy to separate out how much of that was the smartphone vs competitive pressure on text messaging costs and package inclusion of lots of texts / unlimited. The iPhone forced a leap in focusing on bandwidth as the new new thing for profitability as a carrier (so they more willingly gave up texting as a profit center).
By contrast, the UK sent about 1/2 as many text messages as the US in 2004, while having 1/5 the population. A sizable difference for sure.
The iPhone and T-Mobile, acting as separate forces on the market, definitely completely alterted the US mobile market. T-Mobile deserves an extraordinary amount of credit for hanging in there, losing a lot of money for a long time, and slowly delivering a more competitive market. It's great to see them getting rewarded with growth and nice profits.
NZ$30 (~US$20) per month, back in 2010, would get you 300 SMS, 300 minutes during night and weekend, and 20 minutes during the day.
Is this correct? I always thought it was coined on some bulletin board or chatroom.
I was surprised to learn that "tnx" was an early morse code convention (lol is 'hihi'). Oh and seeing the phrase "tricked out" in a book from I think the 1800s (via Gutenberg.org) was also surprising.
A laugh is actually just "hi", although sometimes it would be repeated if conditions were noisy. Then it would be "hi hi" with a space in between, not all sent as one word.
So why was "hi" used to indicate a laugh in Morse in the first place? There's no obvious connection with either the word "hi" or the individual letters "h i".
The reason is that the meaning here is not in the actual letters or word, it's the sound of "hi" in Morse:
• • • • • •
It just sounds funny to hear that. A bit reminiscent of the rhythm of the old phrase "shave and a haircut, two bits" but more concise.
Oddly, many hams to this day also use "hi" or "hi hi" in voice contacts instead of laughing. I guess that's not too different from saying "lol" out loud!
"es" is another interesting abbreviation. This of course is the Spanish word for "and", but hams always use "es" instead of "and" in Morse. It's one letter shorter, but that's not the real reason. Here's "and":
• ——— ——— • ——— • •
• • • •
I'm confused. The Spanish word for "and" is "y". Maybe you meant that hams use "es" instead of "is"?
Now I'm not sure what the derivation of "es" is. It's definitely used to mean "and", but I don't know why.
In any case, thanks for the correction.
Update: I just figured out where I got the mixed up Spanish connection! There is a Spanish word used as a Morse code abbreviation, and in fact it's used in every QSO. It's not "es", it's "de" which means "from" both in Spanish and on CW/Morse. So I had the right idea, wrong word.
hi hi tks es 73 de WJ6V
It's 160 chars over 120 bytes using a special 7 bit encoding. However, if you fall back to ASCII it's 120, or if you're using a wide character encoding it drops to 60. But as someone else says we have concatenated SMS these days to cater for the longer messages.
I think we who live in the industrialized societies have fallen behind mobile technology if we measure it by its impact on society and cultural innovation. We have better and newer technologies, but they are improving productivity and shaping the world less and less.
In contrast, many developing world countries are developing their society around mobile technology. it's changing developing world Africa, India, Eurasia, etc. Large areas of the world will never have landlines, fiber, ASDL etc. Just the mobile masts with microwave links from village to village or in the middle of a slum.
I love the "Running light without overbyte" approach that removes distractions and provide working services that are actually compact and revolutionary. They improve productivity and change the society.
It went from state of the art technology, to the de facto communication channel for teens and youth, at least in Europe, to being obsolete in less than 25 years!
Back in the 90s the telcos were completely caught off guard - this was signalling architecture meant for setup/teardown of calls and other bits and pieces.
Overnight a booming cottage industry in SMS Service Centres sprung up to offload all the additional traffic.
Many telecom operators also offers basically unlimited texts and calls for a fixed price which makes it often an easier way to communicate than to figure out what service person x is currently on. I use sms way more than I communicate on any other digital service. I would like for everyone to use Signal or something but so far I only have 1 contact there. And by using sms, at least I know it is not indexed and searched by an american company to sell me more ads. Also, I live in a country with large, pretty empty areas. In several of these locations the 3G/4G-networks are often unavailable but sending a simple sms works just fine.
GSM lore says that SMS originated as network debugging/management feature, which I don't think is exactly true. I suspect that the thing was originally an demonstration for GSM's capability of transfering arbitrar-ish user packet data in control channels (of which SMS is to this day only usage I know of), which got implemented in handsets because it was part of specification and then it was used for network management messages and then got commercialized as SMS.
It is not improbable that this guy actually wrote first implementation of the network side of SMS (ie. SMSC) that was actually useful for commercial customers, as the low-level SMS protocol only handles message transfer between network and handsets and does not specify network behavior or even addressing of subscribers.
I couldn't understand when my friends were excited about the "new program" that was doing exactly what any SMS / MMS should do. Then, few months later, I was the last one to install it, because it was the only way of comunicating with friends.
And photos and videos were available as email, skype, messeger...
I would bet that here (in my country), SMS wasn't sexy because of the interface, email wasn't that real-time conversation (and you needed to know the e-mail address).
Needing just the phone number (that was a common thing to share), not using e-mails (that was seen as too tech, too formal) and having a better look than the SMS interface was the point. All other features were just a bonus.
Edit - the handset I was upgrading from could only receive SMS; I believe my father's handset at the time couldn't even receive them - but that may have been a carrier limitation, not down to the handset capabilities.
And the prototype wasn't new in 2001 - it had been around for a year or maybe two before that, so 10 years feels about right. Roughly. Ish.