It started with “Merry Christmas”. SMS is 30 years old. Do Poles still like to send them?

3 1992 Neil Papworth, a British Vodafone engineer, sent the first SMS (Short Message Service) in history from a stationary computer. It is known that “Merry Christmas” was received by one of the company’s bosses, Richard Jarvis. He used the Orbitel 901 phone weighing 2.1 kg. The recipient could read the message, but could not reply.

Back then, no one predicted that SMS would become a common form of . Initially, they were to be used only by operators to inform customers about failures and offers. There were also no solutions allowing to send such messages to subscribers of other networks.

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SMS like a postcard

The idea of ​​SMS was born in 1984 – in the minds of the head of the organization Global System for Mobile Communications (they are responsible for the GSM standard) Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert, who cooperates with him.

Hillebrand decided that the limit of 160 characters per SMS was enough. Why? Because he calculated that more or less that many characters can fit on a sheet of paper.

SMS is fine. Poles still like them, but they send them less than before

“Text messages” have been replaced by various types of instant messengers. These messages are sent noticeably less today than 10 years ago. According to the chart on the portal, in 2021 Poles sent a total of 40 billion text messages, and in 2011 – 52 billion.

The SMS service is still used, for example, by clinics to send appointment reminders to patients, as well as by some companies as a form of login authentication. Older mobile phone users are still happy to send Christmas greetings in this way.

– People today spend more time looking at their phones than talking on them. SMS was probably the catalyst for this change, said Ben Wood, an analyst at UK-based CCS Insight.