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Monday, 03 December 2012 21:44

Happy Birthday SMS

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first sms phone

In the picture above you can see the first mobile phone to receive a text message in history. The message was "Merry Christmas" sent by a computer on the 3rd of December 1992. Neil Papworth from the company Sema Group (now Mavenir Systems) was the sender, using the Vodafone network to transfer it to the mobile Orbitel 901 which was owned by Richard Jarvis, this well known telecommunications company employee. Therefore we can say that today we celebrate the 20th Birthday of SMS (Short Message Service).

It all started in 1992, the US won the Davis Cup, the Prince and Princess of Wales got married, and not many cared about the SMS. But at that time a hardworking and truly humble programmer, Matti Makonen, filled his notebooks with pieces of code and the problem for him was of vital importance. What problem? Matti was not clear about why mobile devices can not send messages between themselves, or is it possible to do it in some very complicated and possiby inaccessible way.

The problem was that the GSM standard was designed for telephony while text is binary data and GSM is a technology focused on two types of communication channels - one for signal and one for data. The data was there for the talk and the signal for communication between devices. That's why Makonen took the template designed by French specialists in 1985, named Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert and Oculy Silaban, who already made the first SMS project that never came to life. Therefore Matti took all the work into his own hands and developed a piece of code that ended with telecommunications company Vodafone, after which the text message was officially "born" and the history of SMS-ing began. As ofl today there have been more than eight trillion text messages sent.

What do you think about the age of the SMS message and how much we rely on it? Tell us in our Forum

Read 3231 times Last modified on Monday, 03 December 2012 21:50

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