Back to the history of SMS, still used despite the arrival of instant messaging applications.
« Merry Christmas Here is the very first SMS from a computer to an Orbitel 901 cell phone, i.e. a car phone weighing 2 kg. It was thirty years ago, December 3, 1992, and the date has little to do with the content. The message was transmitted by the British operator Vodafone. These fifteen characters for Merry Christmas in English, are therefore the first to have used the commercial mobile network.
This first message was also sold in the form of NFT last year for the amount of 107,000 euros. But the story didn’t really begin with that SMS. Other trials had taken place a few years earlier, notably in Finland. The objective was then to help people with hearing loss to communicate. It was then planned to use it as an information system for an operator’s customers. And above all, it took until 1994 for the first mobile, a Nokia 2010, to be able to enter messages and for exchanges to be possible from mobiles.
As its name suggests, the SMS, that is to say Short Message Service, (short message service) was limited to sending 160 characters at a time in the beginning. Today, packets of 160 characters are still sent, but are put together in a single message. In fact, an SMS can contain more than thousands of characters.
Universal messaging
The SMS has had its nicknames and still wears them sometimes. In France, for example, it is “texto”, a term which SFR tried to obtain in 2001. SMS was for a long time paid, but today it is available unlimited. Its MMS variant (Multimedia Messaging Service) goes a step further by allowing you to send photos, voice messages and videos. This function is generally paid for abroad outside the European Union, because it is not the same protocol as SMS.
Over the years and due to text limitation and cost, SMS users have created their own language to shorten certain expressions or image them using special characters. A language that current messaging and social networks have inherited. These modern messengers, such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Telegram… have sought since their inception to become essential by ejecting the good old SMS.
When they are installed, they often offer themselves as the default messaging system. They can actually activate the sending of SMS to people who do not have the application, but it remains SMS. This is why, apart from their ability to encrypt the messages of these applications, the SMS still remains the most universal and common means of communication even thirty years later.
Back to the history of SMS, still used despite the arrival of instant messaging applications.
« Merry Christmas Here is the very first SMS from a computer to an Orbitel 901 cell phone, i.e. a car phone weighing 2 kg. It was thirty years ago, December 3, 1992, and the date has little to do with the content. The message was transmitted by the British operator Vodafone. These fifteen characters for Merry Christmas in English, are therefore the first to have used the commercial mobile network.
This first message was also sold in the form of NFT last year for the amount of 107,000 euros. But the story didn’t really begin with that SMS. Other trials had taken place a few years earlier, notably in Finland. The objective was then to help people with hearing loss to communicate. It was then planned to use it as an information system for an operator’s customers. And above all, it took until 1994 for the first mobile, a Nokia 2010, to be able to enter messages and for exchanges to be possible from mobiles.
As its name suggests, the SMS, that is to say Short Message Service, (short message service) was limited to sending 160 characters at a time in the beginning. Today, packets of 160 characters are still sent, but are put together in a single message. In fact, an SMS can contain more than thousands of characters.
Universal messaging
The SMS has had its nicknames and still wears them sometimes. In France, for example, it is “texto”, a term which SFR tried to obtain in 2001. SMS was for a long time paid, but today it is available unlimited. Its MMS variant (Multimedia Messaging Service) goes a step further by allowing you to send photos, voice messages and videos. This function is generally paid for abroad outside the European Union, because it is not the same protocol as SMS.
Over the years and due to text limitation and cost, SMS users have created their own language to shorten certain expressions or image them using special characters. A language that current messaging and social networks have inherited. These modern messengers, such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Telegram… have sought since their inception to become essential by ejecting the good old SMS.
When they are installed, they often offer themselves as the default messaging system. They can actually activate the sending of SMS to people who do not have the application, but it remains SMS. This is why, apart from their ability to encrypt the messages of these applications, the SMS still remains the most universal and common means of communication even thirty years later.
