prosthetic knowledge

The 20th Anniversary of the SMS Text Message

20 years ago today, the first text message was sent by an engineer: “Merry Christmas”.

At BBC News, an interview is presented in text message format with Matti Makkonen, a Finnish Civil Servant who came up with the original idea. You can read the interview here

Also, why SMS messages are 160 characters long? Via The LA Times:

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

Aaron Koblin - Visualizing Amsterdam SMS Messages

This work is living proof data visualisation can be interesting and beautiful - please check out the videos and other images on this webpage.

The data shown represents geolocation and volume of SMS text messages in Amsterdam during a time period - as you will see in one of the videos, it skyrockets on January the 1st.