'Merry Christmas': 30 years of the text message

The substance connection is celebrating its 30th day - the archetypal was sent to a mobile telephone by a Vodafone technologist successful Berkshire successful the UK connected 3 December 1992.

It was sent successful bid to trial retired the tech, and work "Merry Christmas".

Neil Papworth sent it to 1 of the firm's bosses, Richard Jarvis, who was astatine a Christmas party. He did not get a reply.

Mr Jarvis's phone, a new-to-the-market Orbitel 901, weighed 2.1kg - astir the aforesaid arsenic 12 modular iPhone 14s.

At its peak, telephone users exchanged billions of SMS - oregon Short Message Service - messages each year, and successful 2010 the connection "texting" entered the dictionary.

The work is inactive used, though internet-based, encrypted messaging platforms similar WhatsApp and iMessage are acold much popular.

According to Statista, determination were 40 cardinal SMS messages sent successful 2021 successful the UK, down from 150bn successful 2012. By contrast, determination are 100 cardinal WhatsApp messages sent worldwide each day.

The work is inactive utilized by the NHS to nonstop retired assignment reminders, and by immoderate firms arsenic a signifier of log-in authentication, wherever a fig series is sent which has to beryllium entered into its website.

However, SMS messages are not end-to-end encrypted, and truthful not considered to beryllium secure.

Originally, an SMS could lone beryllium text, up to 160 characters long. The conception was calved successful the aboriginal 1980s but it was astir 10 years earlier 1 would beryllium sent to a mobile device.

Most aboriginal phones had numeric keyboards, with 2 oregon 3 letters attached to each fig - truthful for illustration to benignant the missive C, the fig 1 cardinal had to beryllium pressed 3 times.

"Handset manufacturers didn't see due QWERTY keyboards due to the fact that mobiles were lone for making telephone calls and receiving messages, but not sending them," said Nigel Linge, prof of telecommunications astatine the University of Salford.

Ben Wood, main expert astatine CCS Insight, recalled giving grooming sessions connected however to nonstop and person substance messages.

"It took disconnected similar wildfire and earlier agelong radical were getting truthful accelerated astatine texting connected phones, they could beauteous overmuch touch-type connected a numeric keyboard," helium said.

"These days radical walk much clip looking astatine their phones than talking into them. SMS was arguably the catalyst for that transition."

You tin travel Zoe Kleinman connected Twitter (@zsk).