CASE STUDY A REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION: THE SMS The SMS (Short Message Service) was the beginning of a communication revolution that changed our lifestyle and the way we communicate forever. All started with a Merry Christmas wish from a Vodafone engineer, Neil Papworth, who, on 3 December 1992, wrote a message from his computer to a colleague s mobile phone on a GSM network. One year later, in 1993, Nokia released the first mobile phone with an SMS feature. The way it worked At the beginning, since a mobile phone simply had a handful of keys corresponding to the ten numbers from 0 to 9, group of letters in alphabetical order were associated to each key. To write each letter, you had to press the key a certain number of times corresponding to its position. For example, number 2 was associated with letters a, b, and c. To write letter b you had to press the key three times (the first to obtain 2 , the second to obtain a and the third to obtain b ). From multitap, a new typing mode evolved: text on 9 keys (the so-called T9). Each tap on 5 one of the nine keys produced one of the letters associated with the key: the T9 then offered you a possible meaningful word based on the matching among the chosen letters, and suggested alternatives if the given one was not the intended one. The present Today, we use QWERTY keyboards, and the predictive algorithms of smartphones assist us by suggesting a possible word before we write it completely, or we swype , i.e. we write by moving our finger across the screen, tracing lines that go from one letter to the next. Moreover, the SMS service has been mainly substituted by other real-time communication services using the Internet rather than the phone line and now it is mostly used for multi-factor authentication systems, such as password resets, two-step authentications, and appointment reminders. Answer the questions. 1. How and when did a Merry Christmas wish change our way of communicating? 2. What is the multitap technique? 3. Explain the acronym QWERTY in your own words. 4. What does swyping mean? 5. What is the main difference between SMS messages and other real-time communication services? Give an example of the latter. 6. What are SMS messages mainly used for nowadays? Communication AND PSYCHOLOGY 45