The concept of the SMS arose at the beginning of the year 1980 by the hand of Friedhelm Hillebrand , head of the organization Global System for Mobile Communications . Its acronym stands for “Short Message Service”. Initially, SMS was thought of as a way to notify the user of misse calls or messages in the voice mailbox. However, few believe that SMS would be use as the mass medium for sending text messages from one mobile user to another. The first SMS that was sent commercially was in the Unite States in 1992. The engineer Neil Papworth sent the SMS from a PC to his colleague Richard Jarvis, from the Vodafone operator. In the message he wishe her a brief “Merry Christmas”.
But why 160 characters?
It was the following year, when the use of text messages for commercial purposes was inaugurate. Despite this progress, the development of SMS was slow, since until 1999 messages could only be sent between numbers of the same operator China Email List and at that time the devices had a very high price. Three years later, in 2002, SMS marketing was a reality and 250 billion messages were sent around the world. The technology was more than establishe, the phones were cheaper and all their potential did not stop growing. In 2010, 6.1 billion messages were already being sent. But why 160 characters? The idea of limiting messages to 160 characters arose in 1985 by Hillebrand himself, thinking that this number was “perfectly sufficient”.
Short Message Service
What Hillebrand did was take his typewriter and randomly type. Several common questions and phrases to see the average number of characters he use. And whether he could convey ideas and thoughts in that length of text. He came to the conclusion BX Leads that most of them were less than 160. Characters, so they were ultimately set as the maximum for SMS . The creation of the SMS system markeour lives, since for a long time it has been. The main method of communication between people , even above calls. Today with the advent of instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, it has been affecte in the personal sphere, but it is paying off in other areas. In fact, its new uses have to do with the business sector , with areas such as retail, security, banking.
