Happy Birthday SMS

This week marks the 31st anniversary of the world's first SMS, sent on December 3rd. This simple "Merry Christmas" message sparked a revolution in how we communicate.

In 1992, a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth made history by sending the world's first text message. Working at Sema Group Telecoms on a project for Vodafone UK, he sent the groundbreaking message from Vodafone's Newbury site on December 3rd.

The initial thought for SMS was to act simply as a form of pager, without knowing the implications it would bring for transformational texting. As phones didn't have keyboards in the first place, Papworth wrote the message on a PC."Merry Christmas," was the message and it was sent to Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis who happened to be attending his office's Christmas party. This is what Richard received in the form of an Orbitel 901 phone.

We had mostly relied on pagers and telephone calls to communicate with each other before SMS.

SMS was not that much of a thing for the first time; actually, Papworth did not even have a mobile phone at that time

He still realized, however, that SMS was a revolutionizing way of communicating.

The only thing a message could do at the time was receive it on a phone. Then something miraculous happened!

Nokia was the first to take advantage of the limitation of early phones, which only received text messages.

In 1993, they revolutionized the market with the Nokia 2010, the first phone capable of sending SMS messages.

Remember that iconic "beep" (still my fav) and the 160-character limit?

Pure nostalgia! Nokia 2010.

The first commercial SMS service was launched in Finland in 1993, but it was not a hit at first.

SMS was developed by a Finnish mobile operator called Radiolinja. It had initially been designed for in-house communications between network operators.

With the increase in the use of mobile phones, SMS spread more and more.

What used to be an add-on to voice calls became one of the main ways of consumer communication.

Thanks to LO(LOL, BRB, BTW), :-) emoticons, and slang themselves evolved.

It influenced online communication like email, IM, and social media.

Remember T9? It was the revolutionary technology behind SMS, which popularized predictive text. The innovation made text input easier for users while typing out messages, transforming how people text based on predicted words by key presses, developed by Tegic Communications - now part of Nuance Communications.

Then came the QWERTY.

Early SMS was very expensive and could not be sent across different mobile networks, which limited its use.

By 1999, cross-network texting became possible, and SMS became more affordable, especially for young people using prepaid plans. This accessibility helped SMS take off.

Quickly gaining popularity, SMS became the dominant communication method by the early 2000s.

This widespread use led to its adoption for various purposes, for example, the Indian Tsunami Early Warning System (ITEWS).

ITEWS used a combination of SMS, email, fax, and phone calls to alert people about potential tsunami threats; this shows the adaptability and reach of SMS in communication.

In 2021, Vodafone auctioned that first "Merry Christmas" text as an NFT for a whopping $121K! Proceeds went to the UN Refugee Agency.

Here is the video of the auction.

While SMS wasn't perfect—it had a 160-character limit and was quite expensive—it still revolutionized how we communicate.

Today, it has been 31 years, but SMS still keeps the billions around the world connected and remains integral to all daily services like OTPs for secure transactions. Though applications like WhatsApp dominate personal as well as business communications, the importance of SMS is retained.

Although some organizations have shifted towards WhatsApp OTPs, many still rely very heavily on SMS.

Image credits: Wikipedia, Neil Papworth Website, Mobile Phone Museum, ambrosedesigns, Worldvectorlogo