Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Short Message Service! Happy birthday to you! Twenty five years and one day ago the first SMS ever was sent*. It read ”Merry Christmas” and was sent to Richard Jarvis, the then CEO of Verizon, who received it on his Orbitel 901 cellphone (or, as we would call it today, a large brick).
SMS has been worked on since 1985. Heard researcher of the project was a German called Friedhelm Hillebrand. It is thanks to him (because of him?), as well as thanks to the limited technology of the time he worked in that today’s messages are limited to 160 characters. Yes, nowadays text messages can be much longer, but these are not actually single SMS’s – they are instead a chain of single messages seamlessly connected to one another. What is interesting is that SMS were at first not supposed to be available for customers; they were created with operators in mind. Their purpose was to allow phone operators to inform their clients about promotions and other important news, kinda like the spam folder in your e-mail box :D. SMS was first used as a commercial service in Finland, 1993, where it quickly gained popularity with the teenagers.
Today SMS is still alive and kicking, although the service is seeing slow decline thanks to messenengers such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Still, it is unlikly that the SMS will disappear anytime sooner than in ten years or so.
*I am pretty sure that the first SMS ever was sent before that, in Vodafone’s laboratory, during the service’s tests, but hey, that does not make a good headliner.