SMS is an important invention

 What’s bigger and far more important than Facebook? Its low tech and dopiest need any smart phone or even an internet connection. And this year marks its 20^th birthday , which means  that in internet it’s 140 years old.

 Got it? It is SMS - text messaging to you and me.Two third of the world’s population – that’s over four billion people have access to it because that’s the number of people who have mobile phones , and even the cheapest chunkiest handsets can send  SMS message. SMS was the brainchild of a European initiatiave. The first mobile phone was analogue devices and the market was bedevilled by incompatiable technologies and protocols. But in 1982 a European telephone confrence decided to tacle the problem and set up the GROUPE SPECIAL MOBILE (GSM) committee and established a group of communications engineer in Paris.

Five year latter 13 European countries signed an agreement  to develop and deploy a common mobile telephone system across Europe. The result was GSM  - a unified open standard based mobile network larger than that in US.

The idea for SMS was based around a really neat trick to transport message on the signalling paths needed to organise telephony during periods when those control channels were quiet. This was a fantastic idea because it meant that there was no extra cost involved in transporting the message . The only restriction was that they had to be short – no more than 160  seven –bit characters. So SMS was built into the GSM system from the begening.

The strange thing was that almost  nobody paid any attention at first, it looked like a truncated email. As a result  SMS use were remain low for years. The reason may be because in earlier days only adult could have mobile phones and adult didn’t seems to know what text messages were for.

Then in 1996 something changed: Pay as you go SIM cards were introduced. Suddenly teenagers could acquire mobile phones.And when they got them , they did know what SMS was for.  The graph turned skywards  and its been going in that direction ever since . SMS is now world’s most  intensively used data communication technology. One source claimed that over 6 trrillion text message were sent in 2010 , for example and that was more than triple number sent in 2007.

Source- Hindustan Times