Short Message Service
The Creation of Personal Global Text Messaging
The only book to provide the full standards-based history of SMS, from concept through standardisation to market takeup, written by the main Chairmen of the standards groups: Friedhelm Hillebrand (centre), Finn Trosby (right) and Kevin Holley (left), together with Ian Harris (not pictured, sadly deceased in June 2010).
Please see the GSM History site here: http://www.gsm-history.org/
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Kevin Holley's Pages
(formerly known as PARSLEY)
This non-commercial web site is run by Kevin Holley from home in my spare time.
About Kevin Holley
This text is first published 10th February 2008:
A brief history of my involvement in SMS ... my first meeting was in June 1988, where I invented the concept of using a time zone in the SMS header. Since then I played a key part in getting the most out of the available single SCCP message bandwidth, implemented the compression of characters to obtain 160 characters from 140 bytes, invented the SMS TP User Data header, including the use of the <CR> character to erase a control sequence at the beginning of a line (<CR> traditionally sends the display to the beginning of the current line and starts erasing everything there). On 28th January 2008 I extended this concept to allow switching of languages in new phones to enable different characters to be displayed. This was started specifically for the Turkish language. The concept is that <language><ESC><CR> is sent at the beginning of a message. On older phones the CR will go back to the beginning of the line and overwrite this sequence, i.e. it is invisible to older phones. On newer phones the phone will switch to the extended character page for <language> to allow additional characters to be displayed with <ESC><character> which are shown in older phones as a similar character. On the 5th February 2008 I extended this concept to allow switching between languages mid-message using <language><ESC><SPACE>. This latter technique needs to be used to avoid that on older phones part of the text is overwritten. It does have the downside that the older phones display a single space character when the language is switched mid-message. Phones can intelligently process the input text and use the <ESC><SPACE> instead of a space between words when language switching is required.
INDUSTRY THOUGHTS
Old link to some thoughts on SMS software
I used to have this website on Demon Internet at Parsley. The pages from there are available on this site, but are no longer being maintained. As I get time, I will be updating this site to provide new information and newer versions of software. To go to the old pages click below.
Last Updated: 16th August 2010