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posted by martyb on Monday December 04 2017, @09:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-u-cn-rd-ths-thn-u-cn-txt-lk-a-pro dept.

The world's first SMS text message was sent 25 years ago.

The man who sent the first ever text message 25 years ago has told British broadcaster Sky News that he is proud of his achievement.

British engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS (Short Message Service) from a computer to a mobile phone belonging to the then-director of Vodafone Richard Jarvis, he told Sky News.

The message read simply: "Merry Christmas."

Papworth said that Jarvis was unable to reply, because at that time it was not possible to send text messages from mobile phones, only to receive them.

And a happy new world.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:01PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:01PM (#605334)

    c u l8r

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:02PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:02PM (#605336)

    of SMS spam you can't filter.

    FUCK YOU, Papworth

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Snotnose on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:13AM (2 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:13AM (#605415)

    Worked for Qualcomm. The dirty secret to a text message? Every n milliseconds the phone wakes up and asks the base station "got anything for me"?, base station sez yay or nay. The shortest packet that could be sent was 256 bytes, but the message only needed less than half that. So they invented SMS messages. It pretty much costs the phone company $0.00 to send a text, it costs more to keep track of billing than it does to send the text. Which is why we thought it was funny the phone company charged $0.25 per message. Think about it. This wasted space, that would normally be either filled with 0's or otherwise ignored, some brilliant marketer said "um, wouldn't it be cool if we....."

    Think about it. Phone only has to wake up, find the pilot signal, send a "you got anything for me?" + the latest SMS the user might have sent. The base station hears the phone, says "yea/nay", possibly with a text message or indication to ring the phone. Setup a phone call? You have to dedicate resources for the transmit and the receive link. The controller in charge of resources has to know what you are doing. The controller has to wonder if you're about to move from one base station to another and get ready for a handoff. That's a lot of CPU work. Text messages avoid all that, the info is all sent in the "um, got anything for me?" "yeah/no".

    Did I mention the phone wakes up some 20-50 times a second to send these "got anything for me?" messages? Yeah. It's called a slot cycle index. Make it smaller, phone is more responsive to incoming phone calls. Make it longer, battery lasts longer. If memory serves, most carriers set the SLI to 20 milliseconds or so.

    Ever wonder why twitter has a 140 +/ x message limit? It's cuz SMS messages had a fixed size, and twitter had overhead.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 2, Disagree) by bob_super on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:00AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:00AM (#605437)

      When you only had 10 keys to type and 1 to 4 lines to display, a 140-character SMS was already plenty.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:53PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:53PM (#605753) Journal

      Wired once published an article comparing the cost of sending data via text messaging (using typical US messaging rates at the time) to the cost of sending data to Mars. IIRC, data to Mars was significantly cheaper.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:45AM (#605427)

    The message read simply: "Merry Christmas."

    Did not! It read "Happy Holidays", and that was good enough for us back then.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:56AM (#605434)

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:04AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:04AM (#605497)

    I remember having read about SMS from the European press, and then asked a US provider when they would provide it. They said they wouldn't because "there was no demand". A few years later everybody was texting.

    Fuck America. Always at the ass-end of deploying technical progress since Reagan. Always afraid to try anything new until dragged into the future.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:24AM (#605505)

      Always at the ass-end of deploying technical progress since Reagan. Always afraid to try anything new until dragged into the last decade.

      There. FTFY.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:34PM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:34PM (#605613) Journal

      I was going to say much the same. I remember in the late 90's reading press lamenting how behind Americans were in texting vs. Europeans. Most of that was industry shills trying to open new revenue streams with SMS.

      I think it was more a function of the interface, because phones then didn't have QWERTY keyboards or touchscreen keyboards you could type on, only the number keys that you had to press repeatedly to toggle between letters. It was clumsy.

      Blackberry was the first to crack the code because they provided the physical interface others were missing. Palm Pilots brought in the touchscreen path. Fast forward to where we are, and it looks like the Palm Pilot path triumphed.

      Given how prevalent texting is today, I wonder if anyone has gone through and calculated the cost/benefit of the communication form. How much productivity has increased vs. time lost to road accidents because people text when they're supposed to be driving.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:52PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @06:52PM (#605751) Journal

        I think it was more a function of the interface, because phones then didn't have QWERTY keyboards or touchscreen keyboards you could type on, only the number keys that you had to press repeatedly to toggle between letters. It was clumsy.

        T9 predictive texting solved that problem very well though. In many cases I think that was easier to use than a modern smartphone keypad, as long as you're entering actual text. The only place it would really suck is if you want to type in a complete URL or anything else with a lot of symbols.

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