It's amazing it took so long to arrive in the USA.
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.
> 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.
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.
I love all the fruitfan revisionist history. The US might have been a mobile backwater, but the iPhone was hardly the point of change. For god's sake there was free night and weekend minutes as early as 2000 and by 2007 Sprint SERO was giving away unlimited data and all the feature phones and PDA's could browse the web, had GPS-enabled maps, and ran loads of J2ME games.
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 argument wasn’t meant to be that texting didn’t exist until the iPhone
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
Everyone I knew was texting by 2004. Most plans came with a few hundred free messages every month. If anything iPhone has been the demise of texting, since it made it easier to use apps that sidestep texting. Do you not remember all the people who could type faster in t9 than they could on a keyboard?
I would say T9 helped get teens texting FAR more than the iPhone did. Now the iPhone helped get more phones into the hands of teenagers which probably increased the number of texters, but T9's predictive text messaging capabilities helped turn everyone who owned a flip phone into a texter.
I (from the US) studied in France in 2003. In the US, most college sophomores at a very affluent school may not have even had mobile phones, let alone texted using them. In Paris, everyone had a mobile phone and everyone texted. There was a huge difference until a few years later (after I had graduated, with respect to mobile use generally and then the Blackberry and really then the iPhone did make texting popular).
It took a long time to take off in the UK too, despite heading calling party pays. SMS enablement was a subscription service - £5/month from memory - and initially there want interconnect between mobile networks so texts were limited to those on the same provider. On the other hand, the original plans were all you can eat, and pager gateways worked for SMS too.
I was regularly texting in 1998 with friends at university i.e. they'd taken off sufficiently that within 5 years poor university students were texting each other. It was always a case of buying a £5 credit, or you might text a friend back a few days later because you had no credit.
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.
Initially it was within the same network, I believe Orange (previously Hutchinsons, then merged with EE, who themselves known as T-Mobile) was the first to offer a consumer service, called Orange Messaging. As an aside they also offered a second line on the same phone,meaning you had 2 number an option not offered these days alas.
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.
> Plus, it was short. Text messages originally came with a 160-character limit. That's why people developed text message shorthand, like lol for "laughing out loud."
Is this correct? I always thought it was coined on some bulletin board or chatroom.
I think it was BBS in ancestry but maybe they're saying "That's why" as in "That kind of situation is why..."
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.
"tks" is also a common abbreviation for "thanks" in Morse.
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":
Actually, I was the one who was confused! That's what I get for commenting late at night.
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.
Yeah, much “text message shorthand” actually developed on pre-SMS fora (BBSs, Usenet, and various network chat/messaging systems, among others) for reasons other than strict length limits. Particularly on online live-messsaging systems, terse expressions help reduce the slowdown associated with turning thought into communication.
Isn't there still a 160 char limit as well? I thought the support for longer SMS protocol messages these days was just multiple messages in the background. Wikipedia still just says "Larger content can be sent using multiple messages".
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.
SMS is important part of communication infrastructure in the third world. You would be amazed how complex services can run on SMS.
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!
It's not obsolete. It is still the only way you can be pretty sure the recipient receives your message since it works on every phone in circulation. This is used heavily by shops online, postal services etc etc.
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.
I also don't need to ask... Should I contact you on WhatsApp, FB, Wechat, Hangouts, Twitter or whatever the shiny thing of the day is. Just give me your phone number.
Doesn't iMessage work internationally? iMessage just works. It's beautiful, especially when everyone you know has an iPhone. And I'd say China blocking some services is more China's fault than that of WhatsApp (terrible name).
The beauty of SMS is its serendipity. It was "just there" as an unused network feature and somebody thought to commercialise it.
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.
I'm having a hard time believing someone would have had a phone capable of receiving text messages at a Christmas party if nobody had ever before successfully sent (and therefore received) one.
I have feeling that the event in the article is about first message that was sent acrosss production network and with the intention of SMS being user accessible (and paid) service.
But it was still sent from a PC instead of another phone so not really the commercial use-case. And regardless, why would they not mention it instead of making this guy sound like he actually wrote the whole sms system?
In that times the first usecase probably was to displace pagers.
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.
And yet we still don't have reliable text messaging in the US. On T-Mobile, I lose a good chunk of text messages sent to me from other networks that are longer than 159 characters.
And then we needed some app (whatsapp, you know) to be revolutionary because it allowed to send unlimited messages to some phone number, including photos!
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.
Your friends were probably excited because they didnt have a character limit when sending a text, they didn't have to pay for each message they sent, they could share images, videos. All of that for the fraction of the cost of sending a text message.
I would even include the better interface, as it had a better look than the regular SMS screen. Character limit wasn't the deal because their whatsapp message are still short. And even the cost of messages was negligible, because the main point of the cell phone plans were unlimited messages.
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.
SMS simply wasn't an option on the earlier GSM handsets; I remember in 1996 or so in one of the early GSM adopters -Norway - when shopping for a phone, the salesman showed me two identical-looking Nokia sets, a $100 price difference between them - one could send SMS, the other only receive them. I went with the more expensive one, as the cheapest monthly plans at the time ($6/month fee) priced daytime calls at $.85/minute, making SMS (at $0.15 a pop) a good deal.
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.
The argicle state that the 'first SMS' engineer sent it from its home computer, so it's not about how it got to the market but who used the technology first. I'm pretty sure thoses who invented SMS did send SMS way before the guy in the article. Looks like advertising for canadian telecom tech, to embelish history.
My family had an Alcatel One Touch Max that could receive SMS in upper or lower case but could only send SMS in ALL CAPS. Forced to shout at everyone. And that was released in 2000.
I remember visiting a Philips research facility near Maastricht back in 2001 back when they still made mobile phones. They had a prototype oled-display phone they were showing off. It took some 15 more years for that to go mainstream. Interesting how long a lead time there can be from concept to consumer product.
The problem with Philips' OLED displays around 2000 was that they were monochrome and for several years (97-2001 or so) Philips' marketing promised color ones "next year".
Where does that 15 years figure come from? Samsung used AMOLED in the first Galaxy S back in 2010, and every update since then. The only thing that I can find happening around 2016-2017 is that Apple finally caught up. Did Qi also not exist before 2017?
SMS was there from the very beginning, and likely network engineers were sending around messages for testing purposes, but it only came to light as a commercial feature in the 90s ...
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.