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What did the first text message say, sent in 1992?
Engineer Neil Papworth sent it to a Vodafone executive's phone.
On 3 December 1992 Neil Papworth, a test engineer working for Sema Group in the UK, typed 'Merry Christmas' on a computer and sent it to the Orbitel 901 handset of Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at a Christmas party. The phone could receive text but had no way to type a reply, so no answer was sent back.
SMS, the Short Message Service, was designed in the 1980s as part of the GSM mobile standard, and it was devised to use spare capacity in the signalling channel that carries information such as call set-up. The length limit of 160 characters came from that design; Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the standard's architects, reportedly arrived at it by checking typical postcards and telexes.
Phones could not originate messages at first. Consumers got the ability to send texts later in the 1990s, and volumes grew sharply once operators allowed messaging between networks. Papworth has said it did not feel momentous at the time. Messaging via apps has since taken much of the traffic, but SMS remains widely used for codes and alerts. Early handsets required users to press a key several times per letter, which shaped the abbreviated writing style that became associated with texting.