As people have reminisced, there was plenty of digital radio and beepers and pagers (not to mention mobile phones, email, and so on), and new technology could have easily been implemented if necessary. The question should perhaps be, why was there not more massive popular demand for text messaging in 1985? Cost and marketing certainly have something to do with it; do most people need text messages now?
A communication protocol needs a critical mass to be viable. When the only texting-capable devices were expensive two-way pagers, only the very rich or those who needed them for their jobs had them. Which meant that those were the only people you could communicate with using them, which meant that there was no incentive for anyone else to want one even if they could afford them. You couldn’t, for instance, text your spouse at the grocery store that you just noticed you’re out of eggs, because you’d only have (at most) one texting device in the household. Once everyone had a device capable of it, though, it did catch on fairly quickly.
When mobile cellular networks first appeared, in the 1980s, it was an analogue world and the technologies were primarily designed to carry voice channels. There were also several competing standards, especially in North America. This made the mobile phones big, clunky and expensive. This was 1G.
The emergence of digital technologies for encoding voice data as packetised data, with all the benefits of error checking, frequency hopping and reuse, cell handover and more efficient ways of modulating the radio signal to carry data, that was the great leap forward. The market in the US was somewhat held back by lots of competing digital standard, but in Europe the GSM standard was widely adopted and eventually became the global standard. This was 2G.
GSM used a management channel to help control the network and it was possible for engineers to run tests by sending a simple text message. It was never intended to be anything more than that. SMS texting was never seriously envisioned as a service that anyone would want to pay for. Remember mobile phone contracts were expensive, the phones were status symbols and a premium service only affordable by businessmen with expense accounts. Imagine trying to sell a SMS texting service to that type of customer. They would look at you as if you were mad and claim that they simply wanted a phone to be a phone, none of that fooling with a tiny keyboard to send messages.
That changed when the economies of scale kicked in mobile phones became cheap enough for teenagers to afford. Mobile phones fit very well to the pattern of relentless chatter that is typical amongst the young. But the way voice calls are charged made this unaffordable. Someone, somewhere showed how to send an SMS text using a phone for free and it took off dramatically. Kids were busy sending texts to each other in class.
I remember worried engineers saying they were seeing larger and larger amounts of traffic on the management channel and they would have to do something about it. Eventually this came to the attention of marketing people and they turned it into a service. You really don’t need a smartphone to text as long as you have nimble fingers and all the basic mobile phones could do this. Some kids could send dozens of messages a day and run up huge bills if their parents were not vigilant. However, the telecoms operators realised this was a huge money spinner and adapted their plans to bundle in free texts along with free voice minutes.
All those business guys? They used Blackberries for sending email from a mobile with a decent keyboard, that was integrated with their corporate email system. They, too got hooked on messaging. Sadly the Blackberry Corp, like Nokia and many other telecoms companies were taken by surprise when Apple cleverly overtook them by re-inventing the smartphone.
The Telecoms business, though based on a procession of technologies, is actually managed by quite cautious companies. The mobile phone manufacurers regarded their customers as the big telecoms operators, who thought they knew what sort of phone and service the end customers wanted. When the phones got into the hands of young people, suddenly the way phones were used to communicate changed dramatically. Only Apple seemed to understand this and it gave Jobs and co, the opportunity to carve out a business that disrupted the market. But that was not possible until the smartphone technology matured enough.
Even during the SMS/Text boom in the late nineties, there were companies who made the connection with the Internet. Even with 2G, it is possible to get a really thin data channel to make up a text based Internet like service called WAP. This was heavily marketed as ‘mobile Internet’ in 2000. A full seven years before the smartphones and 3G mobile networks were really mature enough to provide credible services and products. The Telecoms industry went from boom to bust in 2001 misjudging the development of technology and the demand from customers for new services, it took many years to recover.
Your timing has to be just right. Most companies are either too late, missing opportunities like Nokia. Or too early and oversell services and rely on technologies that are not quite ready. Customers also have to be ready for it and there is no telling quite how people will use a technology once it is in their hands.
:o
Yeah, I was living in Europe (Hungary) at the time I got my first cell phone (a Nokia flip phone) c. 1999. Texting was already becoming a standard method of communication there. Talking to my friends in the US, it seems like the US lagged behind by several years before it whole-heartedly embraced texting. (Which, reading through this thread, several posters concur with this observation.)
Who were you supposed to send these text messages to?
Remember that cell phones in the 80s were a privilege of the doctors, lawyers, and Hollywood elite. Cell towers were crazy expensive, and equipment and service plans were priced accordingly.
The good thing about early cell phones, however, was that you could instantly tap into a network of hundreds of millions of landline telephones. So a rich plastic surgeon in LA could call his patients, his office, his family, other businesses, etc. But if texting were around, he could what, text other rich plastic surgeons?
I think a more interesting question is, Why weren’t home telegraph systems a thing? Because if people had been texting each other on landlines for a decade, then dedicated cellular texting devices might have had some utility. Is it just that nobody would want to send a text message to a phone if they didn’t know who was going to be there to read it?
eta: Ninja’d by Chronos, always hit refresh on a stale tab before typing a response.
My phone, and I suppose most others on the market, do have voice input. I certainly can compose a text by speaking, if I’m so inclined.
I knew a guy who claimed that IBM cheated out of a patent for the first touch-tone phones to be used for texting. He was also a major CT and saw some UFOs but he doesn’t believe in aliens because he knew they were built and launched by the CIA, so his claim about the texting patent tends to fall on deaf ears.
A lot of the timing coincides with available inexpensive technology. You need inexpensive portable devices with usable keyboards. Texting also wasn’t on the list of future technologies we all want, we wanted the cell phones, and camera phones, texting seemed like a step backward in technology. When people realized they could avoid actually talking to people through texting it began to take off.
Well the technical answer is that telephone network was designed to switch voice circuits, not send text messages. Digital circuits were available to connect routers or bridges together, but they were rationed and expensive. Only businesses could afford them. They were rationed because they generated interference on other lines: cross talk.
The huge mass market was for voice only lines. Now it is possible to send data over a voice line using a modem. Or, indeed, images using a fax machine (these were very popular bit of office equipment in the 1980s). Modems could convert a voice line into a digital line and connect two computers together, but it was slow, the data rates were a few kilobits per second, maxing out at about 56kilobits. Compare this to todays standard broadband line, that is measured in tens of megabits. Such slow speeds are fine for text based communication and there was a profusion of dialup bulletin board services. Much like this site, but without the graphics. A guy with a computer, some telephone lines and modems could create their own BBS and many did. Some were linked together into networks. AOL was the big one in the US. Microsoft had its BBS and there were many others. You could post messages, send email and chat. But, it wasn’t really mass market. Not everyone had a computer and it was very much a niche market for computer nerds. Bill Gates really thought this was the future, he had to very quickly redirect Microsoft once he realised it is was not dialup BBS systems, but the Web that was going to the next big thing.
The problem was dialup modems were slow and unreliable, they were not ‘always on’. You had to dialup and listen for the screetchy sound of modems synchronising until they locked onto each other you had a connection until the line dropped. No-one is going to do that to send one simple text message.
The technology leapt forward at about the same time as mobile phone technology went digital, then satellite TV and terrestial TV all moved to digital. The reason for this was the development of silicon chips dedicated to digital signal processing, squeezing the maximum amount of data carrying capacity out of a copper wire, cable, radio or microwave link. A DSL broadband router has the equivalent performance of 250 or more of those old modems all working on the same phone line, with a another 250 at the other end in the phone company office. All that crammed into a small chip in a broadband router.
The voice network based on copper cables was re-engineered by the big Telcos to carry data packets over digital modulated lines instead of being prioritised for analogue voice. This has been a huge undertaking by the telecoms companies and require very large investment, but these always on digital circuits have in turn enabled all the Internet technologies we use every day.
Some privileged people did have always on digital circuits from their company to their home in the 1980s. Though some were used by engineers, business executives would often have them, so they could send their email faster and access important management systems.
It has been always like this. When they built the railroads and laid telegraph lines alongside, the morse code operators would often chat using morse when the lines were not being used for telegrams. Some of the morse operators were young women and some guys and sometimes they took the train to visit each other for a date and that was in the 1880s. What was missing all the way up until the 1990s was a mass market technology that brought such a communication link into an individuals home and was easy for anyone to use. Quite soon after, it was on a personal smartphone, a technology that is now reaching billions of people.
Texting gave rise to Twitter, a technology perfect for bite sized morsels wisdom whose utility is now appreciated at the highest levels of business and politics, for better or worse!:dubious:
I’m aware of a few texting-like examples that go back more than a century.
In 1917, Irving Vermilya wrote about how in 1903 the teens in his neighborhood set up a private telegraph system for what today would be called “instant messaging”, using Morse code and lots of abbreviations, that operated a 24/7 partyline: Amateur Number One (telegraph extract).
In 1912, there was a report from Germany about The Teleprinter, by which “Each office is supplied with one of the new instruments, and anyone can use it to send messages to another subscriber just as he would operate a typewriter.”
In his book I Looked & I Listened, Ben Gross mentions that “in the thirties” his New York City newspaper began a short-lived experiment where a housewife wrote radio program reviews, and:
Cost was also a big reason that texting lagged behind in the US. It wasn’t until recently that unlimited texting became a standard part of a phone package. I used to pay as much as 25 cents for each incoming or outgoing text. A short conversation could easily run a couple of dollars, while I had more voice minutes than I would use. Much cheaper to call someone.
As pointed out by others, it was a convergence of technologies.
Digital phone networks, and digital phones, were relatively new until the mid-90’s or later. So critical mass was an issue. Display technology and the chips to power it were expensive. In this day where a text display or even a graphical LED screen are almost throw-away technology, we forget how painful and expensive it was to make text-display technology. The first cellphones digital still had one-line displays because the phone number was all the phone needed to show… The secret to making it cheap was volume and customized chips to do text, produced in volume. Which didn’t happen until the market was there - chicken and egg scenario. Why spend millions designing custom chips (and hence making cellphones even MORE expensive) when there was not yet the demand?
If you are old enough, you will remember the big debate about - does a child of 14 - 12 - 10 - 8 - 6 *need *a cellphone? They were expensive (at he time)! Each text message was 25 cents - 10 cents - 5 cents. Every year what was acceptable became less and less. My wife was still using an analog phone when in 2001 we were in Italy. We sat in a rail car for a five-hour journey, an two kids sat across from each other, texting back and for and giggling. If that had been the USA or Canada, it would probably have meant a $30 phone bill for that night alone. (Remember news stories about kids racking up $600 in texting bills in one month?)
Cellular is still a major cash cow here in North America. Walk through any mall and check out how many stores or kiosks are selling them.
Unlimited texting in the US didn’t get to be a big thing until competition from things like WhatsApp started getting big. Even if you have a tiny data cap there is no way to make a dent in it sending text. Nobody is going to pay to send texts if they can send them for free using their data plan.
It wasn’t mobile, but a lot of the social aspect of texting was taken care of by AOL Messenger. People forget how ubiquitous it was in the late 90s, early 00s.
And other similar programs like ICQ, which I think might have been available to the general public even before AIM.
One of the problems with this whole discussion, is that the OP started in the middle of the communication revolution, not the beginning. Cell phones were not the beginning.
Back in the early 1990s I was the head of a large group (600+) of collectors across the country, and researching for my newsletter and eventually my book. We were a very energetic group seeking an extremely hot collectible: Watt Pottery. Every Sunday evening, as people got back home from their local flea markets and antique shows, the calls started coming in.
“OMG, guess what I found?” “Denny, have you ever heard of this piece?” “I got 20 new pieces and practically stole them!” We spent hours on the long distant lines every week and it cost a fortune. Then it happened, the step you guys are ignoring:
Email.
By the mid 1990s we all had computers and modems. Holy Crap, we can gather our thoughts, and write them down and send them! And shortly after - photos! How did we ever get along without this?
I actually decried this movement, as excellent as it was, because we all lost touch with each other’s voices. It would be months between hearing my friends that I used to talk to every week.
Then, in the late 1990s - cell phones. We began talking again, and now, we could even talk while at the antique shows!!! Wow! We were all back in touch.
Then the texting started and once again, the ability to put down (edited) thoughts overruled the said-and-done nature of the phone call.
Slowly. Some people. like my grandson, used texting in a different way. We paid his cell phone for him back then and the month he discovered texts my phone bill shot up $600 dollars! 1200 texts, how can that be? Here is how he and his buddies texted:
“Sup?” send
“Nothing, you?” send
“Hanging out.” send
“Cool.” send
Every freaking phrase was a separate text. They were texting back and forth just like they talked, and every send added up fifty cents at a time. Fortunately the cell company was sympathetic and dropped most of the bill. Once. And we dropped paying for his cell.
Dennis
In Europe there are a lot of countries next to each other and roaming with a mobile phone between networks in different countries can be hugely expensive. It is the same with texting and data. Lots of huge bills run up accidentally. It is improved lately with a regulation from the EU setting a maximum charge and extending the deal you have in your home country across Europe.
Until last June to get around the danger of running up huge bills, especially if you phone has a data hungry apps.
People would buy local SIM cards from vending machines or shops and do the ‘SIM card shuffle’ when you got an airport. If you moved between several countries the only solution was some kind of Global SIM deal, which were invariably expensive.
Despite some efforts by telecoms operators to block it, Whatsapp became immensely popular way to solve this problem. If you have smartphone with the Whatsapp app can you can track down some free Wifi, then you can text and call for free across international borders. These days you can also do video calls. So a free lunch for end users! What is there not to like? As long as you don’t mind sharing the data they collect about you with the Facebook family of companies and presumably various government agencies.
Whether these companies mine any gold from monitoring the behaviour of their chatty customers is another matter. As is rather old fashioned notions of personal privacy and who owns the data collected about you and who watches the watchers. These are all big issues and the telecoms operators are not happy to see their revenues decline and lobby regulators against these ‘over the top’ data apps like Whatsapp, Skype, etc. Telecoms versus Silicon Valley and Big Government taking a keen interest in order to watch over the little people.
Who knows where will it end?
Charging for text messaged was an absolute goldmine for the telcos. Given they had no idea what texting was before it happened to them, it was basically money unexpectedly raining from the sky. The charges they imposed for SMS was pure gravy. The actual messages run on the comms side channel, and use, for all intents, no bandwidth. (It is bandwidth in the cells that is the precious resource.) SMS was the most expensive data comms protocol by a few orders of magnitude. For no reason other than that the telcos got away with charging that sort of money for it. Now it has languished, overtaken by a whole raft of other competitors, all of which offer a superior capability.
The charging of global roaming is also little more than telcos colluding to gouge more money out of customers. The telcos charge one another extortionate rates for conduitiing one another’s customers communications (whether it be voice or data) over their networks. They then pass these charges on to their customers. After all they got charged for something their customer did. The justification for imposing these insane charges in the first place? “If they charge us something insane, we will charge them the same back.” Which is basically a cartel. As noted, the EU finally cracked down on their telcos for what is little short of racketeering. Sadly there has been little progress outside the EU on this. It isn’t in the interests of the telcos to relax these charges, as they are a surrogate for the manner they rip money out of their own customers, relaxing the charge only helps a competitor’s customers, and they are all happy with extra money they get keeping the cartel running.
Among other things, because we didn’t have pagers; in the US and in the mid-90s, my friends who had pagers would get texts with those; and because we were also slower to the internet. That’s two ways of sending text Americans got before cellphones and we did not. Most European countries have also never really developed a culture of “leave the message”, because we got dropped calls before we got answering machines.
During the time when companies charged for SMSs and for picking up, people here developed codes based on dropping the calls: if it rings twice times and then drops, it means you need to bring the dessert; four rings, don’t bring anything. The purposefully-missed call didn’t accrue charges.
By the mid 90s, almost all Japanese houses had a phone / fax machine. It was for more popular there for personal use than in the States. The kids were using numeric only pagers for text messages but using codes for words. Sometimes someone would sent a page by mistake to my pager and it would be thing long strong of code which I had no idea what it meant.
My first cell phone in the mid 90s could text, but it was a pain just on the numbers, especially trying to send a message in kanji. Predictive texting really caught on because of that. Unfortunately, there was no predictive texting for English words at the time.
Japan was widely envied amongst Telcos because NTT had worked out a way of charging for services accessible using a mobile phone in the late 1990s. Mobile internet was going to be the next big thing and there was a race to provide big portal websites to service mobile users. Millions were spent on this. Sadly it was all extremely oversold. Smartphones very clunky in 2000, and could only way to provide anything that looked like a webpage over was a very cut down version of HTML and the data speed was a modest 9.6k. A lot of money was wasted on mobile internet services that were launched prematurely.
The Japanese mobile phone market had some unique characteristics. Suppliers and parts for the mobile phone manufacturers were co-ordinated by government, NTT provided the network and charging system and there was a huge demand because far less public access to the internet using desktops and laptops than in other developed markets. They managed to make it work.
The smartphone market really did not begin to take off until 2007 and Apple entered the market and managed to produce the iphone that had stable software and the kind of user interface that customers acutally found easy to use. By that time 3G services with decent data rates were available that made browsing the internet on a mobile phone useable. Apple also created the apps store and found a way to make money out of mobile phone purchases for apps and music.
All these large corporations are desperate to make money out of the huge markets associated with mobile and internet connected users. They try to innovate, but they often do not understand who their customers are and what they want. The mobile phone makers copy each others idea and spend huge amounts of suing each other (Apple v Samsung). The latest attempt by the Telcos to get a slice of the Internet access market is to start charging the video streaming companies for a fast-lane for their services. Smaller companies won’t be able to afford it. Yup, Net neutrality is on the way out, the Telcos in the US have the FCC in their pocket. They have friends in high places.
This kind of attitude could strangle new Internet services being developed in the US in tech centres like Silicon Valley and it will move to Europe or, more likely Asia. The Internet is a global network and exists in many countries. It is very difficult for any one country or company to dominate. Though some do very well by moving their profits to wherever the taxes are lowest.
These unholy cartels never stop trying to carve out a lucrative monopoly and or steal each others lunch. They are pimples on the backside of progress. It is up to governments to make sure markets stay free and competitive. But some politicians just don’t get how important anti-trust legislation is for a healthy economy that encourages innovation.
Mobile telecoms is now looking to 5G services and that will enable mass mobile interactive video streaming. The mobile videophone will have finally arrived. Maybe with the camera mounted on a personal microdrone. It will also enable the transmission of huge amount of low latency data from sensors needed that will be needed to make driving vehicles benefit.
Perhaps we will looking back with amusement at all those millenials with their ‘self-sticks’, commuting in smokey vehicles that were dependent on human drivers and cities shrouded in chemical smog. We will wonder how on earth people managed without 3D virtual companions and apartments whose walls transform into vivid, immersive scenes. To think that people had to go on exhausting journeys to reach places where they could experience some nice place rather than simply download a 360 degree livestream from Netflix corp.
Trying to guess what technologies will shape future is pretty difficult. There are just too many factors that could accelerate or stymie their progress, as much a part of business and politics as technology. What people do with these technologies is always a surprise.