Discover the origin of mass SMS with us. The concept of SMS appeared in the early 1980s by Friedhelm Hillebrand, head of the Global System for Mobile Communications organization. Its acronym stands for "Short Message Service".

Initially, SMS was intended as a way to notify users of missed calls or voicemail messages. But few believed that SMS would be used as a mass medium to send text messages from one mobile user to another.

The first SMS to be sent commercially was in the United States in 1992. Engineer Neil Papworth sent an SMS from a PC to his colleague Richard Jarvis from Vodafone. He wished her a brief "Merry Christmas" in the message. It was the following year that the use of text messaging for commercial purposes began.

Despite this progress, the development of SMS was slow, because until 1999 it was only possible to send messages between numbers of the same operator, and at that time the devices had a very high price.

Three years later, in 2002, SMS marketing was a reality and 250 billion messages were sent worldwide. The technology was more than established, the phones were cheaper and all their potential did not stop growing. In 2010, 6.1 billion messages were already sent.

But why 160 characters?
The idea of ​​limiting messages to 160 characters originated in 1985 by Hillebrand himself, who thought that this amount was "absolutely sufficient".

Hillebrand took his typewriter and randomly typed some common questions and phrases to see what was the Egypt phone number list average number of characters he used and whether he could express thoughts and ideas in such a long text. He concluded that most of them were less than 160 characters, so they were eventually set as the maximum for SMS.

The creation of the SMS system has marked our lives, because it has been the main way of communication between people for a long time, even over calling.

Nowadays, with the advent of instant messaging services like Whatsapp, it has been affected on a personal level, but it is bearing fruit in other areas.

In fact, its new use has to do with the business sector, with areas such as retail, security, banking, transport and energy, and more and more companies are betting on this form of communication with their customers.

SMS service is not dead despite what is believed to the contrary. Every second, 193 thousand messages of this type are sent to the world, and their commercial use is growing.