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The abbreviation SMS comes from the English language and stands for “Short Message Service”. It is a short message service that was developed as early as 1992. In addition to the service itself, the messages are also called SMS.
The meaning of the abbreviation SMS
The word is an acronym, a special form of abbreviation in which the first letters of the written-out word name are used. SMS comes from English and stands for “Short Message Service”. In German usage, however, it is rather the messages themselves that are referred to as SMS (plural: also SMS).
- A special feature is that the messages were limited to 160 characters. This is due to the former Bundespost employee Friedhelm Hillebrand, who analysed the average length of postcard and telecommunication messages and thus arrived at this figure.
- The limitation of characters led to the establishment of a separate SMS language among young people, consisting of abbreviations such as “4eva” (“forever”) for “forever”.
- The first SMS was sent from a PC to a mobile phone (model: Orbitel TPU 901) by engineer Neil Papworth on 03 December 1992. The service was intended to use unused capacities of the mobile phone network at that time.
- By the way, the content of this first SMS was “Merry Christmas”.
- The service steadily gained popularity, so that in 2012 around 60 billion short messages were sent in Germany alone.
- In the meantime, however, the service has been replaced by messenger services like WhatsApp and Signal, which use the internet. Even in 2012, the year of SMS’s success, more WhatsApp messages were sent worldwide than SMS, and the same was true in Germany a year later. Already in 2016, the number of SMS sent in Germany fell to below 13 billion.
- SMS has changed the way people communicate and make arrangements. Many arrangements are now made via SMS and messenger services rather than by phone.
