SMS is 30 years old

On December 3, 1992, the first SMS was sent with the text “Merry Christmas”.

The text message sms is celebrating its 30th anniversary. The first was sent to a mobile phone by a Vodafone engineer in Berkshire (UK) on December 3, 1992. He sent it in for a technology test, and the content read, “Merry Christmas.” Neil Papworth sent it to one of the company’s bosses, Richard Jarvis, who was at the Christmas party. He never received an answer. Jarvis phone, new (then) Orbitel 901, weighed 2.1 kg.

At the peak of SMS popularity, users exchanged messages, sending each other billions of messages a year. And in 2010, the term “SMS” entered the dictionary. The service is still in use, although platforms such as WhatsApp and iMessage are much more popular now. According to Statista, 40 billion text messages were sent in the UK in 2021, up from 150 billion in 2012. On the contrary, 100 billion WhatsApp messages are sent around the world every day. However, SMS messages are not encrypted and therefore are not considered secure.

Initially, SMS could only be text, up to 160 characters. The idea was born in the early 1980s, but it took almost 10 years before it was sent to the mobile device. Most early phones had a numeric keypad with two or three letters attached to each number, making sending a message more of a hassle. For example, for the letter C, the user had to press the “1” button three times. However, in 1994, Nokia’s first mobile phone with the T9 keyboard made it easier to write SMS.

Nowadays, people spend more time looking at their phones than talking on them. Text messaging was undoubtedly the catalyst for this transition, according to experts today.

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