[scoot]

I'm curious when that was. I came up with this idea around 1995 while working for a telecoms research company (a subsidiary of Ericsson). Flight status updates was my canonical example.

Nobody imagined that P2P messaging (requiring multiple presses of a numeric keypad to type one character) would become as popular as it did, so an information service was the best use I could imagine, especially given the growing availability of data through the nascent Web. (Teletext was also still a thing, and we had a separate project for scraping that...)

But guess what those of us with access to SMS (and the general public) ended up using it for?