Greetings, SMS: 30 years and not hearing them (despite WhatsApp)

L’SMS turns 30. It was the December 3, 1992 when the British programmer Neil Papworth sent the text message “Merry Christmas” to a colleague of his, an absolute first which however took place between a computer and a telephone. It doesn’t matter, the big event had already taken place and perhaps not even Papworth had realized at the time how popular this service would become and how many billion SMS messages would be sent every day in the following years.

It was also said on the occasion of the celebration a few years ago: the success of the SMS lies precisely in the fact that the message is short, short. On the one hand it is a distinctive element, on the other a technological limit because each SMS has a maximum size of 1,120 bits: a character of the Latin alphabet is 7 bits, therefore

1.120/7=160

But it’s useless to celebrate it, SMS has now run its course and has been supplanted by WhatsApp and all other instant messaging platforms: no costs, no limits, possibility to send voice messages, photos, videos, documents in complete freedom. So why should SMS be praised?

Simple: why without them there would be no WhatsAppand then because even today, in 2022, text messages are used all right, with a big boost coming from the business world.

Writing SMS with these mobile phones has been difficult, but there are those who have succeeded. Do you remember their names?

The story of the Short Message Service actually starts before 3 December 1992, even in the 80s, when Friedhelm Hillebrand he was working on a mobile communications project for the Deutsche Bundespost. With the typewriter he began to type a series of greeting messages, annotations, thoughts, and he realized that each of these was made up of about 160 characters. “They are perfectly sufficient“, She said.

Matti Makkonen was the first to “think” of SMS in 1984, without however following up on his intuition.

Second step: how to write on a phone. Hillebrand came up with the idea of associate a series of letters to each telephone key: one press on 1 wrote the A, two presses the B, once on the 2 the D and so on (the dawn of the t9…). “Why should I break my fingers writing letters when I can make calls?“, said a colleague. But for Hillebrand the idea was good: he had defined the character limit to make the communication system effective and “short”, and more importantly he had found a way to Insert letters within a numeric keypad.

The idea was so popular that in 1991 it was adopted by the Global System for Mobile Communications. In other words, GSM. Everything was defined by now, only one thing was missing: how to send the message from one device to another?

And it is here that we understand why we must celebrate the birthday today, December 3: the transfer of Merry Christmas from a computer to a cell phone ushered in the era of mobile text messaging. That evening Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old programmer at Vodafone, sent what would later become the first text message in history to his colleagues who were stationed strategically inside a restaurant. As he later recounted, a beaming Papworth then joined them to celebrate together over a pizza …

Neil Papworth interview

1993 is another year to be circled in red: Nokia intern Riku Pihkonen is the first to send an SMS from one mobile phone to another. Once the technology was acquired, the following years were characterized by diffusion of mobile devices, an indispensable vehicle for the widespread adoption of the messages themselves all over the world. The success of SMS is overwhelming, for the joy language purists who have to deal with the birth of completely new words and idioms: LOL, thx, tvb, cmq are just some of the infinite examples.

Meanwhile, growth is exponential, and it is directly proportional to the diffusion of mobile phones first and then of smartphonesand inversely proportional to the cost of the devices and of sending messages:

• 1999: 17 billion text messages sent
• 2002, 10th birthday: 250 billion. It’s the year of MMS, a project that has never been successful
• 2007: 4,100 billion
• 2010: 6,100 billion
• 2012: 20th birthday: first year where texting starts to drop, overtaken by chats

The 10s are those of the birth and subsequent diffusion of alternative messaging systems, those that they pass through the internet so to speak. They arrive Viber, Facebook Messenger, iMessage and especially WhatsApp. In that decade, the decline of SMS was slow and inexorable, but the new platforms they failed to bury the good old message which, despite decidedly less high-sounding numbers, remains alive and finds its strategic position today especially in the world of business and in the relationship between customers and companies.

If the use of SMS has in fact dropped at the consumer level, it has grown by double digits in the working world, especially during the Covid. These are the words of Domitilla Cortelletti, Marketing Manager of Skebby.it to whom we owe the infographic that we report in this article:

The SMS turns 30, but it doesn’t show it. Indeed, in certain areas we are witnessing a real boom and this year it is expected that more than 30 billion will be sent. Being a technology that has been consolidated for many years, SMS is, in fact, considered much more reliable than instant messaging, therefore, perfect for emergency or otherwise important communications such as sending temporary passwords, delivery notices, appointment confirmations , communication of work shifts and much more. But this is not the only advantage of text messages, because compared to messaging they are also considered less invasive of the private sphere and reach all telephones, not just smartphones.

The SMS thus lives a second youthobviously does not have the ambition to replace instant chats but wants to become a point of reference for the transmission and sharing of specific information, from the medical report to the bank’s OTP, from the flight check-in notice to communications of emergency.

100 these days. Indeed, 160.