The marketing Sir sidetracked into a brief history of the short messaging service, and it was interesting enough to make a note of.
Some European companies had voice mail services for their mobile users. The problem arose as to how to notify these people that they had voice mail. Now one these companies which had a voice mail service, Ericcson, as a part of a research initiative for product enhancement of their voicemail service thought up of sending text to notify people that they had recieved voice mail.
Actually, first they thought of sending a flash message on the screens of the phones, but because of lack of uniformity in the display and user interface accross various models, this was not possible.
(Note: now, most service providers do allow you to send messages flashed on the screens of the user's mobile phones, but this will most definately be missed, and the message has to be sent via the SP's online portal. Orange.co.in has such a service. The charges exceed those of SMSes nominally)
Continuing the story, they tweaked the existing framework to accomodate text files. (Note: the format is .smil if you eve find a way of getting it onto a comp, which is possible only with message managers in series 60-90 phones.) Then the companies started sending text message notifications, and later gave the capability for subscribers to use the service directly. This is how SMS as a product was discovered.
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