From the early days of mankind, people have the natural urge to communicate with each other. In the beginning they didn’t have too many choices. They used sounds, signs or messengers and with the development of the mobile technology in the 21st century, the idea of SMS (short message service) became so popular because it is easy and quick. Communicating long distance was almost impossible for man before and maybe only the mammoths were using long distance communications through infra sounds. All people could do was use the smoke signals and simple coding. The great break through was the discovery of the electric current and the long distance communications were carried by long wire lines crossing even under the ocean. First were the direct current and the Morse code to encode information and transmit it through wires. Then the alternating current was discovered and this helped to increase the reachable distance. Even then people used short message to communicate due to the narrow bandwidth.
When the electromagnetic waves were discovered, they made it possible to communicate, being capable of transporting large amounts of long distance information. For almost a century the notion of free SMS was shadowed and wasn’t free at all. Just very recently, compared with the ages, the microwaves were discovered and the microwave technology was the new engine of modern communications. Thanks to the breakthrough, the very high frequency communications evolved and from then everything was possible. Cable telephony was replaced by the microwave communications capable of transmitting all around the world through the global satellite systems not only voice, but also radio and TV signals.
The only step missing was to reduce the equipment size and make it portable. It took less then a decade for researchers to make portable phone terminals and to build a global satellite network destined only for mobile communications. Of course this satellite network is linked to a terrestrial one and makes possible the transmissions between two or more people no matter their location on earth. From this moment on, the biggest improvements were to add to the mobile signal all kinds of services and now we hear again of free SMS. Like all the new technologies, in the beginning mobile communications were very expensive and only the military could afford it. After the launching of mobile telephony and the increasing number of users, the prices became affordable to almost everyone. The first introduced service after telephony was our sms. Today the prices for the sms are so low that many providers introduced the free sms. We are so familiar with free SMS that we consider it something normal. But let’s imagine that tomorrow the earth will be hit by a strong solar storm and electricity will vanish, what will we do? Well, nothing much, and we can use the smoke signals again.
