The History of Text Messages

Texting... it's a style of communication that everyone is familiar with and has practiced even more. So what is the story behind text messages? 

Well, the history behind text messages is a long list of complicated development alongside different collaborators throughout the years building upon each other's ideas. However, the collective ideas of these individuals allowed for a leap in communication technology. An advancement that was so impactful that we are seeing the effects in today's society. 

Matti Makkonen was a Finnish engineer who has been credited with developing the concept of SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging in 1984 during a telecommunications conference. Matti Makkonen was at the time employed by Nokia which he collaborated with during the development and tested this concept in early communication hardware at the time. However, his story may not be well known compared to the other "founders" since he never patented the idea nor did he take credit for the development. 

That went towards the work of Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. They were credited for laying the foundation of (SMS) texting. As they began their research in Franco-German at the GSM cooperation, which is also a telecommunications company, in 1984.

Their work at the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) allowed for a telephone-optimized system that transports messages on the signaling paths needed to effectively regulate the transportation of messages at a minimal cost. However, as a common story, Friedhelm Hillebrand advocated that a 160 character limit was sufficient for most brief communication uses. Implementing this character limit served as an aid to make sure that the messages could fit into the existing signaling formats.

However, the most common story of the first text message was that of Neil Papworth. He was credited with sending the first SMS text message on December 3rd, 1992. 

The message itself was sent using the Vodaphone GSM network in the U.K. Many reports suggest that Neil used his personal computer to send the text and was received by his colleague, through his mobile phone, Richard Jarvis. The text simply read "Merry Christmas". As one may imagine, this "breakthrough" led other telecom groups and networks such as Nokia to integrate this system into their mobile phones using SMS technology. Which also contributed to the development of other messaging technology that many of us are accustomed to.

With the development and long history of SMS messaging, it was inevitable for newer iterations to develop from this technology. Even though SMS technology is still used as the basis of many messaging apps, there are other newer apps such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and the stock android messenger that use MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), and RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging technology. Each improves upon each iteration. However, smartphones to this day, depending on what phone you have, may switch based on the contents of the text message, i.e Text, images, links, videos. It's important to note that these messaging technologies even though improved are not perfect as each has its own limitations.