Old School Fridays – Texting

I think I read somewhere that overall people text more than they actually talk on their cell phones. This is no surprise to most of us. It can be a lot easier to shoot someone a text message than to go through the process of making a phone call, exchanging pleasantries and then eventually asking your question. As we’re doing all this texting you might wonder why text messages are limited to only 160 characters. Why can’t we write as much as we want?

The inventor of the text message is Friedhelm Hillebrand. Hillebrand was sitting at home one day, back in 1985,  typing on his typewriter and noted that each sentence or thought ran about 160 characters. It just so happened that Hillebrand was the chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group’s plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS).

It took some time for the agency t find a data pipeline to support text messaging, but when they found the lane text messaging officially arrived. At first texting had its limitations because it was cumbersome to write a message using  a standard keypad. It wasn’t until T9 took hold that texting really took off. Now texting is here to stay and is even more popular than making phone calls.

So now you know, texting started as an idea born from a typewriter and an idea!