A mainstay of modern communication is now 25 years old.
The first SMS (Short Message Service), or text message, was sent from a computer to a mobile phone on Dec. 3, 1992 by Neil Papworth. The U.K. software developer, who now resides in Canada, sent the first text to Richard Jarvis, a director at the London-based telecom company Vodafone UK.
The message was “Merry Christmas.” Jarvis received it at while at the company’s holiday party.
“I’m proud and I’m happy that I did what I did,” Papworth said in an interview from Montreal.
It would be about another year, he explains, before handsets would able to send message as well as receive them.
U.S. software giant Adobe estimated that six billion people globally had SMS messaging at their fingertips by 2013.
