A short history of text messaging

One of the first wireless text-messaging services sent messages from paging companies to alphanumeric pagers. Motorola, a dominant player in the paging industry, developed technology that consumers, dispatchers, and computers could use to send text messages over its paging networks. But you could send only 80 characters or so at a time, and a message was sent from the paging network only once — regardless of whether the pager was turned on or in coverage range. You could send text messages to pagers in all kinds of ways: Call a dispatcher with your message so that he could type it into a paging-specific keyboard connected by dialup to the paging network; buy a software package made specifically for alphanumeric paging; or (after the Internet became commonly accessible) visit a Web site to send a page. Companies then began giving pagers Internet e-mail addresses to receive e-mail messages and notifications.

Next came two-way paging. Services were available on a number of wireless data networks in North America, from paging networks to wireless- packet data networks. The North American birth of two-way text messaging hit the market in the late 1990s. Few people now remember that one of the first products for wireless e-mail from Research In Motion (way before it created the BlackBerry) was the RIM Inter@ctive Pager, which worked on the ARDIS and Mobitex wireless- data-only networks.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, a Finnish civil servant named Matti Makkonen invented Short Message Service (SMS) capabilities between mobile phones and wireless carrier networks using Short Message Service Center, or SMSC. The main purpose of this technology and service, developed in the early 1980s, was to automatically send customer-care alerts and service notifications directly to consumers’ mobile phones without the wireless carriers having to call them all individually. Then, about a decade later (in 1992), Makkonen’s initial research led to one of the first consumer uses of text messaging on a mobile phone. A telecommunications industry engineer in the UK named Neil Papworth sent one of the first person-to-person mobile phone messages to one of his associates at Vodafone, to wish him “Merry Christmas.” From that special greeting, today’s mobile phone textmessaging industry was born.

The text messaging industry took off in Europe in the late 1990s, and early in this century in North America, when wireless carriers agreed to allow messages to go from one network to another. Just as voice calls cross networks and countries in milliseconds, text messaging services now do the same.