Why did the concept of text messaging not catch on earlier?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve wondered about this for some time now. I can remember when cell phones - actually, at first, they were mostly car phones - were strictly for talking, with no text feature whatsoever. Concurrently, at this same time - the early 90s, when I would have been six or seven - I can also remember beepers. My parents’ friend who was a heart surgeon had one with him at all times. The beepers could display a phone number, and some of them could display text characters as well. But they were two totally separate devices, phone and pager.

Why is it that nobody was making, if not cellular phones capable of displaying text, then at least some kind of dedicated texting devices?

We all remember how much fun it was passing notes in school. There’s no way in hell that, just to give one hypothetical example, a dedicated texting device - a digital note-passer, if you will - would not have flown off the shelves, were it marketed to well-off teenagers the way so many other products were.

Now that email and text messaging have largely superceded voice conversation as the preferred form of communication, its numerous advantages are obvious. (Not to say that there aren’t also disadvantages, but bear with me.) It allows people to communicate at a more leisurely pace, for a casual chat…or, indeed, a faster pace, in situations where repeated voice conversations would be too disruptive. It allows you to take a minute to look up the answer to something, rather than being put on the spot and not knowing. And, in the case of leaving a message for someone to be read later, as on an answering machine - it allows the message to be composed more coherently and succinctly, and it’s also faster for the recipient to read it than to listen to a lengthy voice message.

Why did people not think of this in the 80s or 90s, and develop and market dedicated texting devices? Why did it take the development of smartphones for texting to become so prevalent, when an old-school LCD screen and little rubber keys could have accomplished the same thing?

Or…as may indeed be the case…WERE there such devices, and simply have been lost to the mists of time?

2

There was texting before smartphones. I’ve had several phones in the early 2000s that were capable of sending texts. I believe it really didn’t take off until phones had keyboards. Before that, using the number buttons to enter text was slow and clumsy, considering you often had to hit a key three or four times to enter a desired letter.

3

There were two-way alphanumeric pagers by the late 90s. My dad had one for work at one point. It had, in fact, an old-school LCD screen and little rubber keys. It could also send email, so he could use it to contact people who didn’t have a pager.

4

I remember trying to get people to send me text messages–instead of emails–in the 90s, but to little avail.

Also, Europeans were texting a lot before smart phones. It was in the States that it took so long to catch on.

5

I was *able *to text with my first cell phone back in 2001-ish, but it was a flip phone; texting was like a friggin’ IQ test - press this button twice for “n” but don’t press it again for the “o” until it clears and then punctuation is on this other menu so you have press the pound key (remember those, ya know, before hash-tags?) four times to find a button that you have to press three times to use a quote mark.

I didn’t start texting with any regularity until I got a smart phone.

6

I thought texting was pretty common in the late 90’s. The hassle of writing with the number pad is the whole reason 4 txt speak ;).

7

Oh, I remember the combined number-letter texting all too well. It sucked. And so, it begs the question of why a dedicated texting device - a super-pager, if you will, with a paragraph-sized LCD screen and a full alphabetic keyboard - did not ever exist. I don’t mean a phone that could text, I mean a standalone texting apparatus.

In fact, it seems like something of the sort should have existed BEFORE the actual cell phones. After all, letters and telegraphs came before the telephone. Text communication in a portable, electronic form would seem to be the logical missing link between land line phones and cellular phones…right? Or is my perspective totally skewed?

8

Actually we did.
They were calledpagers. At first you could only send someone a phone number to return your call but later alphanumeric models allowed you to send and receive short text messages.
They are still used in many applications including emergency services, restaurant reservations, etc…
They are more reliable than their successors due to the short data burst and their use of the overlap in cellular and satellite signals.

9

In the UK, texting was popular from the mid-1990’s onwards. I bought my first mobile phone in 1996 expressly for that function.

10

I loved my two-way pager. So much easier when I was on call.
But one of the reasons, IIRC, texting didn’t catch on as quickly in US was most cell plans charged per text message. Very easy to rack up charges.

11

There is no doubt that the appeal of texting caught the telcos by surprise. I got my first GSM mobile phone in 1995. I was flabbergasted to see that the SMS function was not supported by all telcos. Then again, I had had an email account since about 1982. So had a pretty good idea of the appeal.

When you look at capability, remember that the early mobile (aka ‘cell’) phones were essentially devices intended for voice, and the communications protocol had no explicit digital payload. Even in GSM the SMS protocol was tacked onto the side as something of an afterthought. These were times when the world was ruled by such entities as the ITU, and for them voice was king. Everything was about how to optimise voice over limited bandwidth links. The idea of digital data was something quite foreign. This was pretty much the deal with all the telcos. Many many decades of technological development all directed at voice, and a mindset of monetising voice.

12

The “texting capital of the world” (starting in the late 90s and until now) is the Philippines. In 2003, US users were sending an average of 13 texts a month, vs. 79 a month in Ireland, 120/month in South Korea and 195 a month in the Philippines.

13

The first ‘text’ message was done before cell phones, before touchtone. It was when your kid was told to ring me once when you get there, hang up so you don’t get charged for the call. So there was a bit of negative stuff about texting from the point of view of the phone and cell carriers, they wanted you to use minutes.

Beepers and texting though them was seen as inferior to calling by the cell companies, but it was also cheaper. As beeper use exploded the profit dried up there. Cell phone companies didn’t worry as the beeper market collapses on it’s own due to price wars and didn’t see much of the need to step in to a market with no profit left and still wanted people to use minutes.

Another aspect, the cell phone companies has left open part of their transmission protocol for future expansion which went unused, it was what set the limit to the numbers of characters in the original text messaging, so when they decided to add texting they already had the block of transmission time set aside.

14

And as of today I still cannot send or receive a text on my landline. Heck even the VM indicator waits hours sometimes.

15

A text message in the Philippines, both then and now, costs PHP 1. At current rates that’s about 2 cents per text message. Plus you don’t have to pay for incoming messages. And if the person you’re texting is on the same carrier, it’s likely free.

16

My first cell phone, which I think I got in the mid to late 90s, could receive texts but it could not send them. I remember wondering for years (literally) why my phone would sometimes beep, but no on was calling. Then I somehow got into the text function and saw these texts from over the years. This was a Motorola flip phone with the pull-out antenna.

17

You could not text in the 80s (as in the OP) because there weren’t cell phone towers yet. By the 90s, though, there were and people were texting. I have never texted because I cannot use those impossibly small keyboards and I probably never will. I don’t understand why it is so popular, but the holy grail for computer makers is voice input. Now maybe if I could use voice input to send a text…

18

I think the reason it wasn’t developed in the 80s is because the original cellular network used analog signals, not digital. In fact, those analog cellular networks continued to operate till 2008.

19

I remember that it was much more popular in Europe to start with. The main reason was the SMS feature was originally free for some phone companies since it was unused space. The younger users used the text feature and did not have to pay to communicate with their friends. If they used voice, it would cost them. It was later when it became popular that the telco’s started to realize they could commercialize this.

20

I avoided texting because at the time, it cost 15 cents per text sent or received.