How did SMS change the world 20 years after its birth?

In today's rapidly changing times, there may be few things that will never change like SMS.

Nowadays, people have many ways to contact and interact with each other. The message with a maximum of 160 characters has always been responsible for passing news, gossip, jokes and other contents between people. Compared with Facebook and Twitter, more people rely on text messages to contact each other. The power of short messages can even crush a session of * * *, on the other hand, it is constantly changing people's lives.

201212 February 3rd is the 20th anniversary of the birth of short messages. Nowadays, the number of short messages sent worldwide reaches 7 trillion every year, which is equivalent to sending and receiving 200,000 short messages every second on the earth. Tracing back to the "development history" of mobile phone short messages, we can see that its position at the beginning of its birth was very humble. 65438-0984 Back in Copenhagen, Finland, a Finnish communication engineer named matti makkonen discussed the information transmission system based on GSM digital cellular communication system with two other colleagues in an Italian pizza shop in Copenhagen. At that time, GSM digital cellular communication system was only a technical standard in northern Europe, and then it was popularized throughout Europe. Eight years later, SMS has become the standard of global communication industry.

The sender of the world's first short message is Neil Paavos, an engineer of Sema Group in Britain. He was only 22 when he sent this message. The recipient of the short message is Richard Jarvis, the department head of communication operator Vodafone. He was at the company's Christmas party when he received this message. The text message reads: Merry Christmas. Paavos sent the world's first short message not by mobile phone, but by personal computer. Jarvis used a "portable phone" named Orbitel 90 1 to receive short messages. At that time, the mobile phone was 2. 1 kg, which is equivalent to the sum of the weight of the current 17 iPhone5. Papworth said in an interview with reporters before: "There are always many people asking me if I think sending a text message at that time will change the whole communication industry. I want to say that I was an engineer at Sema Group, and Vodafone paid us to write a program that could send text messages. I will do it, as simple as that! " The original intention of SMS is to remind mobile phone users of unread voice messages, and the SMS function at that time was also free. But interestingly, people will call their voice mail regularly to see if there are unread messages.

With the development of the times, the emergence of prepaid mobile phone service and T9 predictive input method has helped the global mobile phone market to make great strides. By 2000, the number of short messages sent and received in the world reached 654.38+0.7 billion, and this number increased nearly 20 times in the following two years. There are about 6 billion mobile phones in the world today, and almost every mobile phone supports the function of sending and receiving short messages.