Thx 4 d mmrs!
That is text speak for the Bob Hope song from the 1938 movie, “Thanks for the memories.” And a strong mixture of old and new. Memories, I suppose.
You may be marveling that I was able to render that old song phrase into modern text speak. No? Well, full disclosure is that I found a site that actually translates. Both ways.
On December 3, 1992, a British engineer named Neil Papworth sent the first text message: “Merry Christmas.” Txtspk came along later. RTN highlighted this achievement 5 years ago with one of our first newsletters.
The idea for text messaging was put forward at a telecom conference in 1984 by a Finn named Matti Makkonen, who has since done his best to shrug off the title of “father of SMS,” or Short Message Service. 8 years later, SMS was actualized.
What are the results? How many texts are sent each minute and at what cost?
Some statistics:
- 18.7 billion texts are sent worldwide every day (over 900 million each hour and 15 million each minute).
- 4.2 billion people are generating all these messages.
- Since 2011 – last published date for this information – texting charges averaged $.11 each, while the cost to the provider is $.008 – not quite a penny.
- But with 8.3 trillion texts warming the Internet waves in 2016, that is still a profitable industry, even with cost at $66 billion.
Now we understand why Google’s best answer for cost was dated 2011. They evidently don’t wish to expose this gold-mine. As though people will suddenly stop texting if they found out?
