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In a world first, on 3 December 1992, an engineer sent the message “Merry Christmas” from a PC to a mobile device using Vodafone’s UK network.But the origins of the idea date back further to Matti Makkonen. Over a pizza at a telecoms conference in 1984, the former Finnish civil servant put forward the idea of a mobile phone messaging service. This was to become the SMS (short message service) standard.It was just one year later, in 1985 when researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand suggested that 160 characters was “perfectly sufficient” for all communication purposes, a line of thought that soon gave birth to the very notion of a Short Messaging Service (SMS).<\/p>\n
And so, it was the 3 December, 1992, when the first ever text message was sent, by 22-year-old British engineer Neil Papworth. On this day, Neil marked his place in the history books, revolutionising communication as we know it today, all by sending a text message that read “Happy Christma” (the ‘s’ was missed off). At the time, Neil first believed SMS to be an innovative way for a company’s staff to communicate with one another, a line of thought perhaps explaining his infamous understatement shortly after sending the world’s first text message: “at the time, it did<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"