Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology. SMS is not only where the term text messaging comes from, but it's older than AIM, older than MSN, older than ICQ.
> Not SMS? Funny how quickly the iPhone has erased the memory of earlier mobile technology.
Not sure that's true. I used AIM before I had a cell phone (and therefore SMS). While the technology for SMS has been around since the early 90's it really didn't get widespread adoption in the US until the early to mid 00's.
For some SMS may pre-date AIM, but I don't believe that is true for the majority.
It's a cultural thing. When I first started importing phones from overseas to the U.S., I showed a bunch of people at a party how cool it was that I could get e-mail and text messages on my phone. This was 1999.
The majority of the people didn't know what e-mail was, though they did have AOL.
Most knew about text messaging, but laughed at the idea of T9-ing a message to someone for 35¢, when you could just call them and talk to them for free.
I think that is the root of the US/EU divergence on text messaging. Because Europeans at the time had to pay for every call, inbound or outbound, text messaging was cheaper than talking. For Americans, it was the other way around. So each followed the path that was least expensive.
When I was in Germany in '99, the calling party paid for phone calls. Incoming was free. I don't know what an SMS cost but it was reliable across carriers and borders.
When I moved back to the US in '01, SMS was free. If your phone and carrier supported it. If you sent an SMS to someone on a different carrier, in another country, or on a phone from last year, they probably wouldn't get it. When all these issues were solved and SMS usage started to explode, then the carriers decided to go for the money-grab... which was dumb and probably the direct impetus for iMessage.
It is certainly true that SMS predated it, but in the US SMS was very limited at the time. The cost and mediocre phone keyboards kept its use down, and, of course, it wasn't practically usable from PCs.
Ironically, SMS probably replaced AIM for a lot of people as a lot of these limitations started to fall away.
Text messaging = SMS for many people in the US. The term SMS has never been used much by consumers here, that I have heard. People call it texting. It has only been popular enough to be useful since about 2002-2005, which is after the glory days of ICQ for me.
I recall AIM implemented a feature where you could add contacts by cell number (instead of screen name) and then it would send the AIM messages as texts
SMS had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive way to send data outside of non-commercial satellite and exotic military technologies. I can remember fees of $.35 for 160 7-bit characters worth of data, using bandwidth that was otherwise just going to waste. Carriers got so greedy with SMS.
That comes to about $2.1 million per gigabyte. But it's also a bit of an unfair comparison since one user consumes far less bandwidth using SMS vs general data.
No. Ironically, you're probably not old enough. AIM predated any meaningful adoption of SMS in the US by a long time. In the 90s, I was one of the youngest to carry a cell phone (13) -- I wasn't rich either, just a nerd. In the mid to late 90s that was really the nadir of cheap cell phone deals, you could get a phone for a penny and the monthly service for $15-20 for month if you paid $0.15 per minute or so. No SMS though, the phone didn't even support it (That was an all analog AMPS phone - The next year I got a shitty CDMA phone, but still no SMS).
I didn't have a text capable phone until after 2000.
Meanwhile, AIM well I carried the same ID since 1994 or so.
I'm guessing the other responders might be from other countries. SMS was THE thing when I was younger (early 2000s) way before AIM, ICQ or anything else. Mainly because not everyone had a computer, but everyone had a cell phone.
And then when mobile data became all the rage, everyone I know just installed ICQ on their phone because the data transfer for ICQ was less than the cost of an SMS.
I grew up in Europe and when I got to the US, I was surprised to see most of my classmates either without a phone or just getting one. I got my first cell phone when I was nine? Maybe eight? Most of my classmates got their by the age of twelve. In the US, my classmates got their phones when they were 14 or 16 or even older; however, they had ready access to a computer at all times, I didn't have that back in Europe.
European too, and had opposite experience: had access to internet quite young (around 8-9 years old I was already starting to bother my parents so that I could play on battle.net a bit and this meant they coudldn't receive phone calls! but it was max 20h of internet per months... until AOL and their wonderful unlimited dial-up of course). However I didn't get a cell phone until 15.
When I was in sixth and seventh grade most of the communications with my classmates were through AIM. Then it was MSN, then facebook...
My school (in the US) was very striated into ethnic groups. The Hispanic kids were really into MSN, the white kids used AIM, and the black kids used SMS.
I recall having AIM before I had a cell phone. Particularly since IM over AIM was free, and cell phone companies were still charging people for each SMS message in those days - I want to think it was something ridiculous, like a nickel an SMS.
