By now they have almost disappeared from our habits, but 20 years ago they revolutionized the way we communicate. Let's talk about the dear old ones sms (English acronym from “Short Message Service”), who are 27 today.
It was the 3 December 1992 when the British engineer Neil Papworth sent the first message of the story. To do this, he did not use a telephone, but a computer, while the receiving device was a cell phone connected to the Vodafone GSM network. The text? Wishing you a few days in advance: Merry Christmas. The first mobile-to-mobile SMS was sent in early 1993 by a Nokia intern.
The technological and communicative universe of SMS was very different from today's. There were no photos, videos, or colored emojis, but the much more spartan (and tiring) emoticons: colon, brackets and capital letters… To be more precise, even the hyphen as a nose.
To today's kids these signs probably remind the rock carvings of the Paleolithic, but 20 years ago emoticons sowed the seed of a new language now familiar to a large part of the planet: that of messages made of images.
On closer inspection, however, a new form of writing also saw the light in SMS. Let's talk about abbreviations (which weren't so new after all: Greeks and Latins also used them, in their own way...). The most common in Italian were CMQ for “however”, X instead of “for” (hence the disturbing “because”) and the silly or playful TVB for "I love you".
Mind you, some nostalgic born before the 90s may still use that CMQ abused in adolescence, but qwerty keyboards of modern smartphones are gradually erasing this abbreviation trend.
Similarly, over the last eight years the internet and instant messaging apps (her majesty WhatsApp, but also Messenger, Telegram, Hangout, Wechat and many others) quickly replaced the old telephone network messages. According to AgCom data, the maximum number of text messages in Italy was reached in 2012, when we sent a total of 72,2 billion messages. In the following five years, this number dropped by 75%, to 17,8 billion, and the trend - of course - has never reversed.
Today we receive text messages mainly from the bank (for security codes), couriers or marketing offices. But in the end it is not said: perhaps someone can still happen to use an SMS for a Buon Natale with a slightly vintage flavour. Sure, only if the internet doesn't work or the gigs are exhausted.
