SMS messages are 20 years old

In the ever-changing world of technology, there are only a few things that have turned out to be as resistant to change as SMS messages.

Despite the impressive number of different ways for people to communicate, text messages still remain the 160-character way of delivering news, gossip, emoticons, notifications and a lot of other information. They connect more people than Facebook or Twitter. They even resigned the government because of them!

December 3 - the 20th anniversary of the first SMS message.
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Today, the inhabitants of the earth send more than 200,000 messages per second! But technology had a rather modest beginning.

Its appearance can be traced to the Danish pizzeria in 1984. Then Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, was in Copenhagen at a telecommunications conference. He began to discuss with two colleagues the idea of ​​a messaging system over GSM. At the time, GSM was Scandinavian technology. Only later did it become a European standard.

Eight years later, SMS became the standard, and Neil Papworth, an engineer working for the Sema Group in the UK, was a member of the team that developed SMS processing software for Vodafone.

Work lasted for almost a year. Vodafone conducted versatile checks before implementing the SMS messaging system from the Sema Group. Finally, on December 3, 1992, Papworth sent the first message via the Vodafone GSM network using a personal computer. Polnichael was Richard Jarvis with the Orbitel 901 (which weighs more than 2 kg). This message was “ Merry Christmas ”.



So began the era of text messages.

“People always ask if this was a monumental event for me,” Papworth said in an interview. “For me (and I was working at Sema at the time), it only meant that Vodafone paid us to write software. And we did this job. ”

At first, the main purpose of text messages was to notify subscribers of a new voice mail. And this service was provided free of charge. Even in itself, this was a significant innovation - otherwise people had to independently check their voice mail for new messages.

Later, in 1995 - three years after the first SMS - users sent an average of one message in two and a half months. SMS took several years to properly disperse - and most of this time, even the inventor himself did not have his own mobile phone.

The appearance of prepaid plans and innovations such as T9 predetermined a significant increase in the number of SMS messages in the world. In 2000, the industry counted 17 billion text messages. And this number then grew almost 20 times in just a few subsequent years.

Today's number of mobile users has about 6 billion subscribers. Part of the reason for the success of an SMS, and perhaps even the key to success, is its universal accessibility. After all, with the help of SMS you can reach out to any person with a mobile phone on Earth!

Looking back at the 20 years that have passed since the first message, Papworth says that he is not surprised at the success that SMS has achieved.

In those days, I never thought it would all be so big. Now I see what it has become, and I am not surprised, because it is so simple. It is on all phones. Not everyone on the planet has a smartphone, and GSM still only appears in some countries. And in these countries, not everyone will have smartphones, but everyone will have at least the simplest phones that will have SMS.