25 years of texting :)

According to C-Net,

The first text message was sent on Dec. 3, 1992, by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, an executive at British telecom Vodafone, who was attending his company’s holiday party in Newbury, England.

Typed out on a PC, it was sent to Jarvis’s Orbitel 901, a mobile phone that would take up most of your laptop backpack, and read: Merry Christmas. But Jarvis didn’t send a reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone in those days

Although Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, he’s not the so-called father of SMS. That honor (or blame) falls on Matti Makkonen, who initially suggested the idea back in 1984 at a telecommunications conference.

Makkonen played a very active role in the development of the GSM standard, as well as working for Telecom Finland before and after it became known as Sonera.

He disagreed with today’s anniversary right up until his death on June 26, 2015. He believed that we should regard the launch of the Nokia 2010 mobile phone in January 1994 as the true starting point for mobile messaging, because only then could people easily write and receive messages.