Thursday 3 December 1992a young British programmer engineer named Neil Papworthsent the first SMS ever. The content of the message? A simple “Merry Christmas” forwarded to a mobile phone Orbitel 901used by his colleague Richard Jarvis. This event, which occurred during a company party of Vodafone in Berkshire, UK, marks the beginning of a revolution in the communications industry. Curiously, the recipient did not respond, but that short message was enough to usher in a new era. Unlike today, where messaging is dominated by WhatsApp, Telegram and the like, in 1992 the concept of SMS (Short Message Service) was innovative, the result of a technology that had taken almost a decade to move from theory to practice.
Probably no one, including Papworth, was fully aware of the impact that SMS would have on the following decades. Papworth, in fact, admitted:
In 1992, I had no idea how popular texting would become and that this would give rise to emojis and messaging apps used by millions of people. I only recently told my kids I sent that first text. Looking back with hindsight, it is clearer to see that the Christmas message I sent was a pivotal moment in the history of mobile telephony.
The first SMS in history was not sent from a mobile phone
Interesting fact, Papworth’s text message was sent from a computer. This is because cell phones at the time were not yet designed for texting. The idea of sending texts of up to 160 characters dates back to the 1980s, but it was only successfully tested in 1992. A year later, Nokia introduced the famous acoustic signal to notify the arrival of an SMS, contributing to the diffusion of the new communication system. Initially, sending SMS was complicated: the first cell phones did not have QWERTY keyboards, and to write you had to use the numeric keyboard, pressing the keys several times to obtain the desired letters. Despite the difficulties, users quickly developed a kind of shorthand language, the “txt spk”which gave rise to expressions such as LOL and the use of emoticons. This phenomenon anticipated the birth of emojis, now an integral part of our way of communicating.
Another interesting fact, which probably not everyone knows, is that initially it was only possible to send messages to people who had the same network provider. It was only in 1999 that interoperability between networks finally allowed exchange SMS between different operatorsgiving further impetus to the popularity of this form of communication. The 2000s were the heyday of text messaging: billions of messages were exchanged annually, and in 2010, the term “text messaging” was officially entered into dictionaries.
SMS messages are increasingly used less and less
With the advent of instant messaging applications, Over the last decade, SMS volume has dramatically decreased. If we take the United Kingdom as a reference, for example, according to some statistics we have gone from over 150 billion messages sent in 2012 to less than 32 billion in 2023.
Despite their decline, SMS still remains in useespecially for specific purposes such astwo-factor authentication or sending reminder from the National Health Service of some countries, etc. However, their lack of end-to-end encryption makes them a downer less secure than modern messaging platforms.
