It’s been 25 years since the first SMS message was sent

non-stopSummarize The first ever SMS text message was sent 25 years ago; Neil Papworth sent it, and,believe it or not the text was Merry Christmas instead of the traditional Hello world 🙂

Douglas Adams, in his book The Guide of the Galactic Hitchhike said with his usual irony, that technology is a word that describes something that still does not work. And SMS had to deal with a tough start: this new technology did not begin to pave the way for glory until 1999, when the operators adopted the GSM standard for their interconnection, sending SMS between handsets across different operators. A new way of communicating had just been born 😉

The limitation of 160 characters at a time when users paid for sending SMS (yes, millennials, not so many years ago we paid to send SMS) did increase the ability to summarize as well as dvlp th blt 2 cmmnct wtht ll th vwls. While language departments discussed whether this new language adjustments were for the better or for the worse, the SMS adopted and popularized the smileys, those happy faces created by those geeks using the (m)IRC ^ _ ^

From the first SMS to the collapse of networks

On New Years’ Eve SMSes delayed 30 minutes due to the collapse of the networks (some years after,Whatsapp suffered the same delay), voting in reality TV shows sending a text message to the number 12345 writing the word “WIN” followed by contestant’s name, and even used for charity donations. In 2008, Barack Obama sent a text message announcing his pick for vice president o_0

But with the arrival of smartphones and apps, instant messaging applications sprang up, and with the boom of WhatsApp, the use of SMS dropped significantly 🙁

Though, this is not strictly true. The drop in P2P SMS traffic overshadowed the non stop growth of A2P thanks to the great results of marketing campaigns by SMS, to the sending of PIN numbers either for identification, validation or esignature processes) B-)

The question now is, what the future has in store for the SMS. Nobody knows for sure. Some people have been burying it for years, but the fact is that large telephone companies have not been able (or have not wanted) to develop a standard that can substitute SMS as a means of communication for mobile phones to talk among them and to be able to send and receive using the most basic network with very low bandwidth ¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯

It looks like the SMS can still have a significant part on the Internet of things \ o /

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