Believe it or not the first text message ever was on Dec. 3, 1992 in England and was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, who was attending his company’s holiday party in England.
It was actually typed out on a PC and sent to a mobile phone. The size of the phone was quite a bit larger than today’s phones and would fit inside a basic laptop backpack.
The text read Merry Christmas. Unfortunately the recipient could not reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone at that time.
Mr. Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, but actually the responsibility rests upon Matti Makkonen, who first suggested the idea back in 1984 at a telecom conference.
However, technology was not yet ready for this new way of communicating. Makkonen feels that the technology launched in 1994 by Nokia in its 2010 mobile phone was the first device that made it impossible for people to easily write messages to each other on a mobile devices. So there you have it… a Merry Christmas message and an idea, followed by a technology breakthrough and the world’s communicating was changed forever.
According to Pew Research, about 97 percent of smartphone owners currently use text messaging, and to make that more efficient, a new set of sub-languages based on abbreviations evolved as well. Nearly 600 billion text messages are sent annually, and about 20 billion texts are sent every single day.
These days most Americans and businesses would rather text it than say it and it’s a part of every cell phone provider’s monthly plan. United states smartphone users are sending and receiving more than five times as many texts as phone calls each day. OMG – we’re ROTFL! Isn’t that GR8 to know?
