Text Message Blog |
The pioneering messages made possible by technology (part 2)
12:40 16 October 2008 by Colin Barras
First cellphone call
One hundred years ago this May, Kentucky resident Nathan Stubblefield filed a patent for a wireless telephone, but it wasn't until the 1970s that personal mobile phone technology got off the ground.
Martin Cooper made the first call on 3 April 1973. Echoing the origin of the telephone a century earlier, Cooper had a rival in the race to the cell phone: Joel Engel at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Who better, then, to be the recipient of the first mobile phone call than Engel? "Joel, I'm calling you from a 'real' cellular telephone. A portable handheld telephone," said Cooper from a Manhattan sidewalk.
First text message
Inevitably for an invention that has become so ubiquitous, many people claim to have sent the first text message. Edward Lantz, a former NASA employee, says it was sent by Raina Fortini in 1989, from New York City to Florida. Fortini used a pager to write a message - apparently not preserved - in numbers that could be read when viewed upside down.
The first commercial text message sent over a GSM phone network was, like Eisenhower's space greeting, a Christmas greeting.
"Merry Christmas" texted Neil Papworth of Sema Group to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone on 3 December 1992. Papworth actually sent the message from a PC. Riku Pihkonen of Nokia claims to be the first to have physically "texted" from a phone, in 1993.
First emoticon ;-)
On 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman posted a significant message to the computer science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:
"I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
Since then the number of smileys has ballooned and a wealth of human emotion can be represented by a few keystrokes.
First Twitter tweets
Turning to less-established communications, it is just two years since the first users of the now popular microblogging service Twitter began sending "tweets" , blog posts limited to 140 characters.
The very first twitters were automated messages. "When the system was first started, a user would sign up and the first message would automatically be set as 'just setting up my twttr'," Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, told New Scientist.
It wasn't until Twitter number 9 that we reach the first meaningful message: On 21 March 2006 co-founder Jack Dorsey said: "inviting coworkers". Stone himself sent the next message: "getting my odeo folks on this deal", followed by another early Twitter developer Dom Sagolla with "oooooooh". Not quite Samuel Morse.
http://www.newscientist.com
12:40 16 October 2008 by Colin Barras
First cellphone call
One hundred years ago this May, Kentucky resident Nathan Stubblefield filed a patent for a wireless telephone, but it wasn't until the 1970s that personal mobile phone technology got off the ground.
Martin Cooper made the first call on 3 April 1973. Echoing the origin of the telephone a century earlier, Cooper had a rival in the race to the cell phone: Joel Engel at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Who better, then, to be the recipient of the first mobile phone call than Engel? "Joel, I'm calling you from a 'real' cellular telephone. A portable handheld telephone," said Cooper from a Manhattan sidewalk.
First text message
Inevitably for an invention that has become so ubiquitous, many people claim to have sent the first text message. Edward Lantz, a former NASA employee, says it was sent by Raina Fortini in 1989, from New York City to Florida. Fortini used a pager to write a message - apparently not preserved - in numbers that could be read when viewed upside down.
The first commercial text message sent over a GSM phone network was, like Eisenhower's space greeting, a Christmas greeting.
"Merry Christmas" texted Neil Papworth of Sema Group to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone on 3 December 1992. Papworth actually sent the message from a PC. Riku Pihkonen of Nokia claims to be the first to have physically "texted" from a phone, in 1993.
First emoticon ;-)
On 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman posted a significant message to the computer science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:
"I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
Since then the number of smileys has ballooned and a wealth of human emotion can be represented by a few keystrokes.
First Twitter tweets
Turning to less-established communications, it is just two years since the first users of the now popular microblogging service Twitter began sending "tweets" , blog posts limited to 140 characters.
The very first twitters were automated messages. "When the system was first started, a user would sign up and the first message would automatically be set as 'just setting up my twttr'," Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, told New Scientist.
It wasn't until Twitter number 9 that we reach the first meaningful message: On 21 March 2006 co-founder Jack Dorsey said: "inviting coworkers". Stone himself sent the next message: "getting my odeo folks on this deal", followed by another early Twitter developer Dom Sagolla with "oooooooh". Not quite Samuel Morse.
Example:
"Text PROMO to 63566 to join our list for special offers"
