We all have watched how communication within technology has quickly evolved throughout our lives. A lot of us could not even imagine a time before we had texting as a main source of communication.
SMS stands for “Short message service” and it was invented in 1984 by a man named Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. They designed texting to be a short message of 160 characters. Hillebrand tested the length of this message by writing random sentences and counting the characters and found that most messages could be conveyed in 160 characters or less.
Although Hillebrand and Ghillebaert came up with the idea of SMS, Matti Makkonen was known as the father of SMS for inventing the Nokia phone. Texting truly did not start becoming popular until the 1990’s when Nokia released the first phone that could send an SMS. I am not sure if any of you remember watching your older siblings or parents type out texts by clicking the number buttons until you got the right letter, but it took much longer than it does today. Obviously, Nokia did not provide texters with things we have now like spell check or predictive text that support us in crafting messages.. The first text that ever went through was on Christmas which read, “Merry Christmas.” This was a perfect example of how simple messages had to be when SMS first started being used. Nokia then released a new phone that had a large keyboard making it much easier to craft messages.
In the early 2000’s, texting became one of the most popular ways of communication. As it is today, SMS was especially popular among college students. But, on average, people were still only texting 35 times per month… nothing compared to the amount we text now. Companies started using texting as an important marketing tool which helped increase the popularity of texting in all generations. In 2002, text messaging became a part of everyday life with 250 billion messages sent worldwide in that year. Popular TV shows started using texting like American Idol’s “text to vote” feature. In 2007, for the first time ever, the amount of texts sent surpassed the number of calls made. This was also a big year for Apple as the first iPhone was released to the public. The iPhone has changed the way we communicate forever. It has made communication easier than ever, especially between iPhone's.
It has now been 25 years since the first text was ever sent. Today, messaging through apps like iMessage, Facebook messenger, Instagram DM, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc, have become the most popular form of communication for millennials and Gen-Z. We are now able to use texting to our advantage, whether that be school or work. I do not think a single person in our generation could fathom a world without instant messaging.
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