“Merry Christmas” – the World’s First Text Message Recently Turned 25 Years Old | #history
EDN reports on the recent anniversary and context of the world’s first text message:
Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group (now Airwide Solutions), sent the first text message to a mobile phone on December 3, 1992, from his personal computer to the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.
The text message read “Merry Christmas” (note, not “mry xmas” as it would most likely be abbreviated now, 20 years after this first text).
Omnipoint Communications, the first GSM carrier in America, set up the first text messaging service in the United States. Omnipoint soon after offered the first texting between the US and the rest of the world, starting a 160 character micro-blog trend that Twitter would make even more popular. (Twitter reserves 20 characters for non-message content and maintains a 140 character limit.)
FWIW Twitter now allows 280 characters.
Read more here at EDN.
And we all know by the year 3,000 it’ll be pronounced “Ex-mas”:
