Talk about the first text message sent on Dec. 3, 1992, by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, an executive at British telecom Vodafone, who was attending his company's holiday party in Newbury, England.
Typed out on a PC, it was sent to Jarvis's Orbitel 901, a mobile phone that would take up most of your laptop backpack, and read: Merry Christmas. But Jarvis didn't send a reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone in those days ( handsets could only receive messages, not send them).
Although Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, he's not the so-called father of SMS. That honor (or blame) falls on Matti Makkonen, who initially suggested the idea back in 1984 at a telecommunications conference.
A year later, the first commercial SMS service was available in Finland, and Nokia became the first company to release a handset capable of sending text messages.
Growth was initially pretty slow, with GSM customers sending only 0.4 messages per month in 1995. The fact that UK users could only send SMS messages to those on the same network was a big problem until the restriction was lifted in 1999.
The SMS revolution took longer to arrive in the states and took way longer to arrive other countries. US mobile operators charged more for texts and less for voice calls, while PC-based instant messaging services were still incredibly popular.
Thanks to the rise of programs like WhatsApp, Messenger, and iMessage, fewer people have been sending SMS messages since the technology reached a peak in 2012. Last year, Mark Zuckerberg said that daily activity on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined was three times the number of SMS messages sent worldwide—60 billion compared to 20 billion. I guess people would rather type it than say it. :)
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Today, about 97 percent of smartphone owners use text messaging, according to Pew Research, and along the way, a new set of sub-languages based on abbreviations and keyboard-based imagery has evolved. More than 561 billion text messages were sent worldwide in June 2014, about 18.7 billion texts sent every day, according researcher TextRequest.
How Awesome is that?
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