The humble text message has reached its 25th birthday, and it sure has come a long way. The first ever SMS (Short Message Service) was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth on 3 December, 1992. He wrote “Merry Christmas” to his colleague Richard Jarvis.
Jarvis, a director at the London-based telecom company Vodafone UK, received the text message 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.
Since then, the text message which is sent through the phone service provider, has been joined by social messaging services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat, which use the internet, with the text evolving to smiley faces, emojis, GIFs and animojis.
