The Text Message turns 19 years old today

Are you shure? According to Wikipedia, the first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992 and the technology behind the SMS text is 27-years old, having first been developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert.

Text messaging may be 19, but SMS is much younger. The first version of the spec was penned in 1998, and the next revision (which I worked on at my time in Nokia) we finished in 1999.

SMS is much more of an important milestone than text messaging (IMHO) since it allowed inter-carrier text communication. Prior to that, any text communication between carriers had to be routed through text-to-email gateways (which didn't always exist). The length that a text message could be differed greatly between carriers because each text-to-email gateway put different pieces of kruft and headers at the top and bottom of messages.

Once the next version of servers became inter-carrier spec compliant, life got a lot easier for developers. :)

very interesting, kasing Tanda ko na paLa ang #SMS #Technology

Does anyone else get annoyed by the random pictures of attractive women while writing about... SMS! It feels like tech journalism has breed with tabloid journalism and this is what we got. Do we really wonder why there's so few girls in tech?

I wonder, as you state that according to Wikipedia, the first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992 and the technology behind the SMS text is 27-years old, having first been developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. How comes it was then, six years later, that the “Merry Christmas” text was sent? That would have been 1984 + 6 = 1990

:-)

But congrats to SMS