Texting Is 25 Years Old (cnet.com) 68
Readers share a report: The first text message was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, an executive at British telecom Vodafone. Typed out on a PC, it was sent to Jarvis's Orbitel 901, a mobile phone that would take up most of your laptop backpack. Although Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, he's not the so-called father of SMS. That honor falls on Matti Makkonen, who initially suggested the idea back in 1984 at a telecommunications conference. But texting didn't take off over night. First it had to be incorporated into the then-budding GSM standard. Today, about 97 percent of smartphone owners use text messaging, according to Pew Research, and along the way, a new set of sub-languages based on abbreviations and keyboard-based imagery has evolved.
Never on a flip phone (Score:2)
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I think there was only a short time for numeric key pad experts teenagers between they years 2002-2008 so it would be people in their mid-late 20's who in an other 10 years will be all nostalgic about 8339998444664. For for us old guys, dag nabit for those new fangled devices with Q on the 7 and X on the 9. Our numeric key pads or the more traditional dials, back in the day never had Q or X.
Hence Scrabble over the phone wasn't as fun.
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Re: Never on a flip phone (Score:2)
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T9 was great, get out of here with your lies!
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Can confirm. I was a teen during the mentioned period, and I was an absolute tank at numpad typing. T9 autopredection was terrible, though.
I found it fairly reliable. The biggest mistake I saw was with its prediction for the word "plates". The phone would suggest slaves first -- making for some interesting messages about shopping I was doing.
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UNTIL Katrina hit. And after that, if you had a cell phone with 504 area code, you couldn't hardly get a voice call through, no matter where you were in the US, but many discovered that you could text back and forth freely.
. It was Katina that turned me onto txt...and of course with smart phones and real keyboards, it got easier and now..it is really my preferred mode of communication on a cell phone.
I prefer to txt 99% of the time
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T9 worked pretty well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I could type English on a 9 character phone keypad about as fast as I type on SwiftKey on a touchscreen on an Android device. I think the problem is that on a touchscreen the touch errors are quite large so it's easy to hit the wrong key and have to correct it later. With T9 and a physical keyboard you're much less likely to hit the wrong key. SwiftKey is pretty good and fixing errors with one extra tap on the right word though.
But in terms of speed I'd
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...nor could I accept that poor spelling, syntax and grammar that it required.
Now wee get hour pure s pet Ling, sin tax and bad Grandma from Otto correct.
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Dude, you need a spill chick.
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I am willing to bet half of them wern't actually talking to people, but wanted to show off that they were successful enough to have a mobile phone. However they probably wern't actually talking to people, because the rates were ridiculously expensive and prohibitive.
Re:And the world is worse off for it. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're either too young or too dense to remember a time when loudmouths with mobile phones roamed the earth.
I'll take 10,000 silent smartphone zombies over one loud motherfucker any day of the week...
True and somewhat insightful. However after having been rear ended by one a few years back and watching the horror show on the road with cell phones these days it would be far better if there was a driving block on cell towers signal that can only be overridden by signaling a disclaimer that you are a passenger not a fucking driver and that includes bicycle couriers and the like. Of course I can hear the howls of derision of this suggestion but if you kill someone while using a cell phone while driving you should be charged with the exact same charge as impaired driving.
It is sad when you see young parents in their cars with children using a cell phone behind the wheel and socially this kind of murderously stupid suicidal behavior must stop.
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do you also rage against cupholders? Or sun visors with mirrors for make up? Radios?
in past I had to block txts to not get changed inc (Score:2)
in past I had to block txts to not get changed incoming ones I was paying for spam ones. Now they are part of your base plan.
Re:in past I had to block txts to not get changed (Score:5, Informative)
In the rest of the world the sender pays the bill
Yes, "receiver pays" is an American thing. The reason is that at the very beginning mobile phones were overlaid on top of the existing phone system, with the same area codes, and it was impossible for a caller to know if they were calling a landline or a mobile. In America, this is mostly still true.
In most of the rest of the world, mobile phones have a different prefix, and often even a different number of digits. You can look at a phone number, and in a glance you can tell that it is a mobile number. So "caller pays" is reasonable. This is one reason that other countries have a lot less phone spam, and a lot less robo-calling.
Morse Code operators are the first texters (Score:1)
Telegraphers were the first texters. They used abbreviations like WX for Weather, YL for Young Lady, HI for laughter, AGN for Again...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_abbreviations
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No Eggplant?
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Telegraphers were the first texters.
And before we knew it, London had the problem of creepy gin-soaked sexters hanging around telegraph offices.
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XYL Wife (ex-YL)
YL Young lady (originally an unmarried female operator, now used for any female)
LOL!
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Wul, don't forget about Q-signals thar, bud.
QSL - acknowledgement; "QSL, W4NUA Fairfax, standing bye and monitoring"
QSO - conversation
QRT - STFU!! also used as "I am signing out and leaving the air"
I even had a Callbook with *Z-signals* listed. Things like
ZUE - affirmative, roger, 10-4
ZDG - Accuracy of following message(s) (or message...) is doubtful. Correction or confirmation will be forthcoming. (Particularly applicable in the US these days!)
Original Intended Use (Score:3)
The mobile operators were in the process of switching over from the older, poorer quality but better-understood analogue mobile phone network, shifting to an all-digital future. The "SMS Message" came about - along with defining characteristics such as the limited message size - because that was the available "space" in the protocols which support the infrastructure.
In essence, Text Messages were a tool for engineers to help them diagnose problems with the new network.
The decision to actually sell them as a product was quite separate - and, as history has shown, a stroke of genius.
Re:Original Intended Use (Score:4, Interesting)
When digital phone networks were first introduced in Asia, texting was included for free. The messages are sent over the same bandwidth that's used to ring your phone when you get a call. Since there's rarely an incoming call at any given time, that leaves a lot of free bandwidth. So the carriers figured might as well use it for something. And since it didn't cost them anything to provide, they just threw it in as a freebie. So text messaging ended up being free in Asia and Europe.
The U.S. had an extensive and functional analog cellular network, and that inertia made it slower to switch over to a digital cellular network. That gave the carriers time to see what features were popular in the rest of the world. That's how we ended up with 99 cent ringtones and 15 cent text messages - things that cost the carriers almost nothing to supply. There was no genius involved, only greed. If there had been more competition, prices would've dropped quicker. But alas putting together a cellular network is not a trivial task. There were only a half dozen or so carriers (true carriers, not MVNOs), and all of them decided to overcharge for texts. Still, two decades of what little competition there is has driven text prices down close to what they cost to provide - almost zero.
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Sounds like an order wire to me. Which they could have provided themselves, as operator of the network.
And still more universal (Score:3)
The crazy thing is that text messages are still a more universal platform, allowing any person with a mobile phone to message anyone else using a different service provider. The alternatives, such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Slack and Skype are all islands keeping communications with their borders. Even e-mail is still more universal.
I am looking forward to the day that I can text message anyone on any platform, from any other platform. Jabber tried doing that, but from what I understand suffered from technical limitations. Maybe we need a proper 'SX' (short message exchange) field in the DNS records and IETF define an RFC for some universal platform? Then again, without a government mandate, I doubt we will see this happen.
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The crazy thing is that text messages are still a more universal platform, allowing any person with a mobile phone to message anyone else using a different service provider.
It wasn't always so. At first you could only send text messages to customers on your carrier. Then they started to realize that a network that can't connect to any other networks holds little value and started to work toward interoperability, but it was haphazard.
Re: And still more universal (Score:2)
No GSM is GSM. Maybe the non GSM networks had issues with nonstandard SMS protocols
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No, you couldn't send texts between networks, at least in the UK. I remember only being able to text other people on Orange (my network). They were all GSM. This would have been in the late nineties.
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No, you couldn't send texts between networks, at least in the UK. I remember only being able to text other people on Orange (my network). They were all GSM. This would have been in the late nineties.
That's my recollection, too, as an Orange user in 1995. With the 160-character limit and the awkwardness of using the keys–as well as not knowing anyone else on Orange at the time–texting seem like an oddity that I didn't expect to catch-on.
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The crazy thing is that text messages are still a more universal platform, allowing any person with a mobile phone to message anyone else using a different service provider. The alternatives, such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Slack and Skype are all islands keeping communications with their borders. Even e-mail is still more universal.
Kinda-sorta "universal."
I have an unlocked Android Samsung Galaxy S5 with Verizon firmware on the Rogers Canada network.
My wife can send me a tex
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Also, if there's a "group text" happening on a group of iPhones and I get dropped into it I can't participate in the group. I get some of the messages as individual texts and I can reply to that one sender.
I suppose this is partly due to Apple going with iMessage, which ends up putting it the same well as the other closed solutions? MMS has always been a bit of a shit show from my experience. The idea was okay, but it never really seemed to evolve. Maybe IP based MMS would be the next needed iteration?
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Still waiting for a solution to this ... (Score:2)
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I'm still waiting for a solution to the text messages that people send me that insist on using stupid abbreviations for actual words. We don't pay by the character to send/receive text messages any more, please use real words. Even respectable companies do that with their text messages from time to time; please don't use "R" in place of "are", "U" in place of "you", "B" in place of "be", "2" in place of "to" (or "too") or make other such idiotic assaults on our language.
Top 5 funny retorts:
5) sincerely, Mrs. Brossiot, Asst. Dean English Dept., Luzr U
4) BR, old guy
3) tl;dr
2) now, get the hell off my lawn!
1) STFU
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LOL, ATM.
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please don't use "R" in place of "are", "U" in place of "you", "B" in place of "be", "2" in place of "to" (or "too") or make other such idiotic assaults on our language.
If the traffic light is about to turn green, and I still have two more messages to send, then I don't have time to spell everything out.
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If the traffic light is about to turn green, and I still have two more messages to send, then I don't have time to spell everything out.
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you are reading and sending text messages while you are driving a car you deserve to lose your license. I have absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who believes that they can safely operate a 2 ton vehicle when they aren't looking at the road; such menaces should lose their license on the first offense and face a severe penalty.
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I have absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who believes that they can safely operate a 2 ton vehicle when they aren't looking at the road
I appreciate your concern, but my vehicle weighs over 4 tons, which is more than enough inertia to protect me in an accident while texting. Don't worry, I will be safe.
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stfu grmmr noob
Hard to believe (Score:2)
that SMS made it all the way to the ripe old age of 25 without running its car into a bridge abutment while texting.
SMS messages were invented by a genius. (Score:2)
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new set of sub-languages (Score:2)
Too bad SMSes suck on the Internet. (Score:2)
E-mails, AIM, etc. don't work well to SMS. :(