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Happy Birthday SMS: 25 Years of Short Message Service

Yesterday SMS celebrated its 25th birthday. The now standard technology was developed in 1985 in a collaboration between France and Germany.

However the first text message was not sent until seven years later. (“Happy Christmas”) was sent on December 3, 1992 over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom from Neil Papworth of Sema Group from an R&D lab using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone.

Since then Short Message Service has become one of the primary methods of communication in the world (and probably one of the most popular methods of dumping a partner.)

Figures suggest that it's only getting stronger with each person sending more and more texts each month. The average 'SMSer' sent 35 texts per month at the start of the millennium; a decade later they send 357 messages per month.

Not only a way to keep on touch, SMS technology a very lucrative industry. In 2009, worldwide text messaging generated in excess of $150 billion and that figure is forecast to reach $233 billion by the end of 2014.

So, Happy Birthday SMS, I think we'll be seeing you for a lot longer. That is unless your big brother the email takes over.

Source: into mobile

One thought on “Happy Birthday SMS: 25 Years of Short Message Service

  • I’m having a bit of a problem right here. I want to buy a good cell and cannot decide on which one to select. To begin with, i thought of the Nokia 5610Nokia 6500, which my buddy has. It appears quite tough, and everything seemed alright, but then i started looking at other phones. Now my largest problem is deciding between the Nokia 5610Nokia 6500 and the Samsung Blackjack i607. Any advice?

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An absolute tech junky, I graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in Computing and now live on the outskirts of Leeds working with you guessed it, Computers. I love all things gadgety but really dislike wires. For those of you who haven’t worked it out the name of the site is a combination of my nickname (Gaj) and the pronunciation ‘Gadget’.
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