Why text messages are limited to 160 characters

The LA Times Blog explains why text messages are limited to 160 characters and interviews German communications researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand, the gentleman who figured out how to transmit and display text messages on cell phones.

Amos E. Joel Jr., Cellphone Pioneer, Dies at 90

Amos E. Joel Jr., an inventor whose switching device opened the way for the cellular phone business, died Oct. 25 at his home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 90. [via The New York Times]

Mr. Joel received more than 70 patents, but he was perhaps best known for No. 3,663,762, a 1972 patent that allows a cellphone user to make an uninterrupted call while moving from one cell region to another.

“Without his invention, there wouldn’t be all these people walking around with cellphones,” said Frank Vigilante, who was one of Mr. Joel’s supervisor at Bell Labs. “He really allowed that business to form and to be a business.”

25 Anniversary of the First Commercial Cellphone Call Timeline

Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the first commercial cellphone call in history. On October 13th 1983, Ameritech executive Bob Barnett called the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell using the now legendary and bricktastic Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.

Here's Gizmodo modified cellphone timeline highlighting this historic event.

The Evolution of Mobile Phones

Handset retailer, e2save.com has been in a nostalgic kind of mood recently, and decided to create this little movie illustrating the evolution of the mobile phone through time and a brief look at the future. Filled with interesting details on which changes were important.

[via Cellular News[

'Mobile' phone enjoys centenery

One hundred years later, Nathan Stubblefield is finally being recognised as the inventor of the mobile phone.

Photographs of the world's first "wireless telephone" have revealed that it was not quite as mobile as its modern counterparts.

According to The Telegraph, the telephone was made up of a system of wire suspended between metal rods with the transmitter placed on a train carriage or boat.

When the vehicle neared, a signal was sent through the air to the telephone using magnetic fields. It could be heard near the other end of the wire through another phone.

[via CrunchGear]

The Case Communicator, 1936

The Case Communicator was the first portable electronic workstation. At a time when the business landscape was defined by male executives, the case provided a 24/7 link to their secretary, giving access to their news, music and schedule.

[via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Book Argues That Bell Stole Phone Idea

A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime - that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray. Physorg.com.

" In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell - aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner - got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.

Text Messaging celebrates 15th Birthday

In December 1992, Airwide Solutions was responsible for delivering the first ever SMS. The message, delivered on the Vodafone network, said 'Merry Christmas"and the man who sent it, Neil Papworth, is still working as an engineer for Airwide today.

... To celebrate fifteen years of SMS, Airwide last night hosted an industry party in London, which included a panel discussion on the evolution of SMS and the future of mobile messaging.

The panel focused on what growth potential remained in mobile messaging and how consumers will adapt to new messaging formats. The panel agreed that text culture is here to stay and, with applications such as mobile advertising, mobile internet, payments and location-based services, text messaging will continue its growth even in a mature market.

There was unanimous agreement that global mobile subscribers will drive the continued growth in SMS and, as new messaging technologies are developed, it is the consumer who will decide which format will be successful in fifteen years time.

[Press release]

Happy Birthday SMS

The Short Message Service Centre (SMSC), the principal application behind text messaging, celebrated its 15-year anniversary on 23 July, according to Mobile Messaging 2.0, reports ITWeb.

Acision evolved the SMSC infrastructure from a basic ‘SMSC box' to a complete next-generation, IP-based SMS architecture, centred on Acision's IP SMSC. This enables text management, a range of differentiating service scenarios and a single rack capacity of 16 000 messages per second that can grow to virtually unlimited levels.

More history, less technical: On December 3, 1992, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS with "MERRY CHRISTMAS" on it, to his collegeagues at Vodafone in Great Britain. But it was 7 years later that texting really took off.

Why did it take so long? Because for the first 7 years, cell phone users could only send an SMS to someone using the same operator. It wasn't until 1999 that short messages could be sent between different networks.

According to Andrew Bud, managing director of SMS transmission company mBlox, interviewed in the BBC, texting really only took off when it found its natural market — teenagers —attracted to pre-paid phones. "These pay-as-you-go users found their money went further with texting - which some networks originally neglected to charge for".

The technology was actually created by an Anglo-Dutch information technology firm called CMG, as reported in The Guardian.

According to Cor Stutterheim from CMG, "It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other," added Stutterheim.

History of Cellphones - In Pictures

The history of cell phones - in 15 pictures on MSN. "From From Motorola's first phone, which weighed in at 2 pounds, to Apple's upcoming iPhone, here's a look at how cell phones have evolved over the years."

Left, the Nokia Mobira Senator (1982). It may look more like a boombox than a portable phone, but this boxy, bulky device was actually Nokia's first mobile (if you can call it that) phone. Introduced in 1982, the Nokia Mobira Senator was designed for use in cars. After all, you wouldn't want to use this phone while walking: It weighed about 21 pounds.

[Just Another Mobile Monday via TreoBits]

The history of Smiley. From cool to uncool

News.com reports on the origins of the "smiley" on the Internet and it's spreading to other forms of communication, like IM and SMS - and how it's gone from "cool" to "uncool". :-(

"It'd be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn't leaned on it.; he typographical symbol-- :-), or :) for the minimalists, expressing a smile when typing.

..."The phenomenon is about to turn 25--a dinosaur in Web years. The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

Essentially, the emoticon proliferated along with the Internet itself.

"For people who first get into it, it's like they know the password to the secret club," Fahlman said. But now that emoticons have spread into every niche of Net culture and morphed into myriad (arguably irritating) spinoffs, that sense of exclusivity has lost some of its luster.

"It's kind of pathetic when the 'in group' is sort of half the world," Fahlman observed. "But originally, people were using these because it was some cool thing and it showed that you were a real expert user of the Internet, that you knew the secret language."

Of course, the vicissitudes of human taste have it that there's almost guaranteed to be a backlash against any trend, and emoticons were no exception. "

I Invented ... The Cell Phone

Matt Rodbard for SyncMag, interviews Martin Cooper, the man who invented the cell phone.

Excerpts

"The 2.5-pound behemoth, christened Dyna-Tac, took years to design, and when it was eventually introduced in '83 as a retail cell phone, it cost $4,000. Hundreds of Motorola engineers worked to create portable antennas, low-current emiconductors and other mini miracles to make Cooper's wireless dream a reality, all in the name of breaking up a monopoly.

"We needed to prove that a company other than Bell could participate in this new industry, and our people did it," says Cooper.

... Since his brainchild not only slew a corporate Goliath but wound up in the hands of every creature on earth, he must be wealthier and more revered than Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Carrot Top combined. Right? "I signed away all my patent rights to Motorola for a dollar when I joined the company and don't get any royalties," Cooper says, without putting a shotgun into his mouth. "But I earned a few dollars with stock options and I still have the $1 check they gave me." That might be worth something on eBay. "

Related:

-- Cell Phone turns 30 - On the 3rd of April 1973, thirty years ago, Dr Martin Cooper, today a trim, white-haired dapper septuagenarian who holds eight patents, most of them in wireless communications technology, made the first cell phone call, in a demonstration outside a Hilton Hotel in New York, that became the first step towards a massive change in the way we communicate.

A New Medium For Their Text Messages

This is interesting insight from The Washington Post on Mobile365, the company that makes text messaging happen.

Mobile365 delivers information across wireless phone networks owned by different carriers. It isn't the only vehicle for messages that move between the different cell phone services but it has captured nearly 80 percent of the market. Last month the company delivered about 1.5 billion text messages.

The firm, with 250 employees in two offices, is now focused not just on delivering text messages, but on helping other companies tap into the wireless medium. Mobile365 powers a text messaging service for Citibank's customers in Asia, for instance, so that users are notified each time their balance slips below $100.

It also manages text voting for "Pop Idol," the European show that inspired "American Idol." And 20th Century Fox hired the company last year to help it promote the release of "Alien vs. Predator." Consumers could vote on which creature was the fiercest, and download ring tones of the movie's music."

Some Nokia history

Wonderful Nokia history in Duncan Bartlett's article for the BBC on Nokia's battle to stay world's number one

-- Fredrik Idestam set up business on the banks of the river Nokia in Southern Finland in 1865 and the firm started by making items such as toilet paper and rubber boots.

-- The company started to concentrate on electronics in the 1980s.

-- Nokia launched its first mobile phone, the Talkman, in 1984.

-- Nokia sold more than 200 million phones in 2004.

The extremely rapid growth in business for Nokia in the past few years has been a result of many people buying mobile phones for the first time.

And there are still millions of people in Africa, India, China and elsewhere who long for their first phone, which Nokia wants to sell to them.

However, in other countries such as Britain, 90% of people have already got a mobile - so to grow its business Nokia must persuade them to replace their kit with something more sophisticated.

"Perhaps it just goes to show that in business, strange things happen - like a rubber boot maker becoming mobile phone company number one".

Better living through technology

Anne Galloway from Purse Lip Jaw looks back at the hype surrounding the first telephones, documented by films and stills from Vocational Guidance Films.

Telephone and Telegraph 1946 - Shows the similarity of jobs in the telephone industry with that of telegraph work.

Communications and Our Town 1947 - A telephone technician explains to two young boys how different types of communication foster links and interdependence between people.

The Nation at Your Fingertips 1951 - How direct long distance dialing made the U.S. a smaller place, and how instantaneous direct communication between Americans without operator assistance became possible.

Once upon a honeymoon 1956 - Delightful musical made to promote color telephones as a decorator accessory in the home.

The Town and the Telephone Late 1950s - Employee orientation film for telephone company workers explaining structure and corporate values of the Bell System. With excellent footage of communications workers and everyday life, in Technicolor.

21 Century Calling 1964 - Romp through the futuristic landscape of the Seattle World's Fair, centered in the Bell System pavilion.

Cellular Evolution

"It took decades for an old technology called mobile telephony to take off. But it did take off—and changed the way the world communicates".

Stephanie N. Mehta, in a wonderful must-read 3 page article for Fortune, traces the history of the cell phone up until today.

Excerpts:

"On Oct. 13, 1983, when "Bob Barnett, an executive at Ameritech, sat in a car parked outside Soldier Field in Chicago and made the country's first commercial cellular phone call. He called Alexander Graham Bell's grandson in Berlin. The sound quality wasn't pristine, and the conversation wasn't especially scintillating."

[ Just for the record, the first non commercial cell phone call was made on April 3rd 1973 by Dr Martin Cooper, in a demonstration outside a Hilton Hotel in New York, "that became the first step towards a massive change in the way we communicate". As reported in Dan Gillmore's Sunday Column for the Mercury News. ]

"For nearly a decade after the Chicago launch, wireless service sputtered along, garnering a tepid 7.5 million users by 1992, and it wasn't until the end of the 1990s that cellphones became truly mainstream...

[...] "Cellphones didn't just change the way we communicate with one another—they changed our behavior. When was the last time you used a pay telephone? How often have you turned the car around because you've left your cellphone behind? Do you remember taking a business trip without obsessively checking your voicemail and calling in to the office?

The gentleman on the phone in the picture above, is Dr Martin Cooper on one of the first cell phones.

Bell 'did not invent telephone'

According to an article in the BBC, "claims that a German scientist invented the telephone 15 years before Alexander Graham Bell are supported by evidence from newly surfaced archive papers.

Successful tests on a German device manufactured in 1863 were covered up to maintain the Bell's reputation, the previously unseen files have revealed.

They show the "Telephon", developed by German research scientist Philipp Reis, could transmit and receive speech.

It is alleged UK businessman Sir Frank Gill - chairman of Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) - was behind the cover-up.

The evidence is contained in files from the archives of the Science Museum in London, rediscovered in October by the museum's curator of communications, John Liffen.

Scottish-born US scientist Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with making the first transmission of speech from one point to another by electrical means in 1876.

But, as with so many of these "world firsts", there are competing claims. Researchers Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray were also known to be working on speech transmission devices at the same time as Bell and Reis".

Fortunately, no such controversy seems to exist with regard to the father of the modern cell phone, Dr Martin Cooper. cf Cell Phone turns 30.

Cell Phone turns 30

On the 3rd of April 1973, thirty years ago, Dr Martin Cooper, today a trim, white-haired dapper septuagenarian who holds eight patents, most of them in wireless communications technology, made the first cell phone call, in a demonstration outside a Hilton Hotel in New York, that became the first step towards a massive change in the way we communicate. As reported in Dan Gillmore's Sunday Column for the Mercury News.

Some other mobile birthdays of note:

-- Text Messaging was 10, December 2002. On December 3 1992, an engineer called Neil Papworth sent the first text message saying "MERRY CHRISTMAS" to his colleagues at Vodafone, from a PC to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the UK, according to the BBC. But it wasn't until 1999, that text messaging really took off, when mobile phone companies allowed users to send SMS to people signed up with other networks.

According to Cor Stutterheim, of Anglo-Dutch information technology firm CMG, who lays claim to creating SMS in the first place: "It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other."

-- First commercial ringtone service will be 4, July 2003. In July 1999, 23 year old James Winsoar, was the first to realise that a feature built by Nokia into their cell phones, allowing mobile phone companies to add their logo and ringing sounds, could be exploited and allow anyone the freedom to customise their mobile phone with graphics and music. He set up My Nokia service in July 1999, the world's first commercial ringtone service.

SMS celebrates 10th birthday

On December 3, 1992, an engineer named Neil Papworth sent the very first SMS with "MERRY CHRISTMAS" on it, to his collegeagues at Vodafone in Great Britain. But it was 7 years later that texting really took off.

Why did it take so long? Because for the first 7 years, cell phone users could only send an SMS to someone using the same operator. It wasn't until 1999 that short messages could be sent between different networks.

According to Andrew Bud, managing director of SMS transmission company mBlox, interviewed in the BBC, texting really only took off when it found its natural market — teenagers —attracted to pre-paid phones. "These pay-as-you-go users found their money went further with texting - which some networks originally neglected to charge for".

The technology was actually created by an Anglo-Dutch information technology firm called CMG, as reported in The Guardian.

According to Cor Stutterheim from CMG, "It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other," added Stutterheim.