Short message service or better known as SMS (Short Message Service) among mobile phone users. The first SMS was sent on 3 December 1992 – 30 years ago by Neil Papworth an engineer at Sema Group to Richard Jarvis a Vodafone employee. Because cellular phones at the time did not support text typing, the first SMS was sent by Papworth from the UK using a PC.
The first message sent was "Merrry Christmas" and it was received on a 2 kilogram Orbitel 901 "mobile" phone. Although first shipped in 1992, the technology was developed by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert in 1984 under the Global System for Mobile (GSM) initiative to bring texting support over cellular networks. Several concepts were produced with Hildebrand finding the 160 character limit sufficient for user needs.
Late last year a replica of the first SMS sent by Papworth to Jarvis was sold in NFT form for $149,729 with the proceeds being donated to UNHCR.
The first text was sent in 1992 but in the early stages only telco companies could send texts to users' cellular phones. Among those sent are information about service interruptions, monthly bills and information about voicemail messages.
User-to-user SMS transmission was only possible in 1993 after Nokia launched some of their latest GSM cellular phones. Among the earliest models to support two-way SMS sending is the Nokia 1011. In the early stages, SMS could be sent free of charge between subscribers using the same network. Only in 1999, cross-telco SMS delivery was introduced. SMS usage skyrocketed due to this innovation.
Composing text using a keyboard in the early days was still not user-friendly. To type the letter "C", the "2" button must be pressed 3 times. The process of typing text became faster with the creation of the T9 keyboard – or its full name is “Text on 9 keys.” T9 can predict what will be typed through a database of frequently used words. The T9 keyboard was created by Cliff Kushler who later created the SWYPE keyboard for smartphones in 2011.
The era of SMS is the era of telco companies printing money because its increased use allows them to record high profits. In the early 2000s in Malaysia, the cost of sending an SMS was around RM50. Although still expensive, it is cheaper than making phone calls that cost more than RM1 per minute.
In Malaysia, SMS started voting for favorite contestants in shows like Akademi Fantasia. There are those who mortgage the inheritance to ensure that the artist in Afundi will win big. On television, there is a quiz show where users answer questions using SMS and some also control the movement of tanks with SMS at a relatively high cost in the early 2000s.
The exact number of SMSes that have been sent since 1992 is a mystery but in 2017 alone it is estimated that 8 trillion SMSes were sent by global users.
After SMS, MMS was introduced in 2002 which supports audio, video, pictures and links to websites. Perhaps there are readers who have memories of receiving MMS on Hari Raya with low-resolution video messages. It may not be cutting edge by 2022 standards but in 2022 it was the pinnacle of technology to the point of being misused to send 3GP clips.
Is SMS still relevant in 2022? The answer is YES. Its use for two-factor authentication of online accounts and TAC banking is still widespread even though it has begun to be replaced by a more secure system.
Apple and Huawei still use the SMS format for emergency communication systems using satellites because it has the smallest size to send with the lowest data usage. In my own situation I prefer to send SMS because it will definitely be received even if there is no internet line.
Since 2007 there has been an effort to replace SMS with RCS (Rich Communication Services) which received the nickname SMS 2.0. It supports chat, text, video, notification of received messages, viewing status and there is an effort for it to send important documents such as boarding passes. Google seriously wants to make RCS the new text delivery standard since 2018 with the major telco companies in Malaysia already supporting it.
In the United States Google is now persuading Apple to support RCS and make it the global text transmission protocol. Apple is still refusing to budge with Tim Cook saying if Android users don't want to see the green text bubble in iMessage, they should just switch to iPhone. Happy 30th anniversary of the Short Message Service and may it continue to be updated to make it better than the current version.
