October 6, 2015

How Text Messaging Started?



It has been more than two decades when texting was introduced as another mode of communication. Within this two decades, Philippines has been recognized as texting capital of the world. In 2009, it was estimated that 1.39 billion text messages sent came from the Philippines alone and keeps on increasing every year.

Message Exchange of Matthew and his Tita Sexy

Before being the text capital of the world, did you know how does text messaging or short message service (SMS) emerges? If not, here is a brief history on how SMS started:

1984 - The concept of SMS was developed by Friedhelm Hillebrand who worked in Deutsche Telekom. He tried to type random sentences using a typewriter and counted every character including space, punctuation marks and numbers. Almost every message counts 160 characters. This became the basis why only 160 characters are allowed in every message.

1985 - Together with Bernard Ghillebaert this concept was developed and created a technical proposal for Groupe Special Mobile which further developed by the GSM committee.

1992 - A test engineer for Sema Group, Neil Papworth sent his first personal text message to Richard Jarvis via Vodafone. Since phone handsets are not yet capable of sending SMS, Papworth uses a computer to send his message. The first ever text message sent was "Merry Christmas".

1993 - Nokia developed the first handset that is supported to sent SMS messages. They are also the first to release a full keyboard mobile phone in 1997 - the Nokia 9000i Communicator.

Nokia Communicator - First Full Keyboard Mobile Phone (Source: GSM Arena)

Now, there are different lots manufacturers creating different features on mobile phones. Aside from the usual call and text capability, most mobile phones nowadays have the capacity to browse the internet.

Aside from knowing the brief history of text messages, do you know how messaging started? You can check it on https://simpletexting.com/history-of-messaging/. It shows how messaging develops from using smoke signals to the use of instant messaging and SMS or texting.

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