On December 3, 1992, the first text message was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, chief executive of British telecommunications company Vodafone, who was attending his company's holiday party in Newbury, England.
Today, about 97 percent of telefoane mobile owners use text messaging, which has evolved with a new set of sublanguages based on abbreviations and images on the keyboard.
Although Papworth is credited with sending the first text message, he is not the so-called father of SMS. This honor belongs to Matti Makkonen, who first proposed the idea back in 1984 at a telecommunications conference.
But text messages weren't sent at night. First, it had to be included in the then GSM standard. Makkonen believes the technology actually started in 1994 when Nokia introduced its 2010 mobile phone, the first device that allows people to write messages with ease.
And in 1992, Papworth put a message on his PC and sent it to Jarvis's cell phone, which would have taken up most of your laptop backpack: "Merry Christmas." But Jarvis didn't post a response because in those days there was no way to send text from a phone.
Today, SMS has become so popular that most Americans would rather dial it than tell it. Smartphone users send and receive five times more texts than phone calls every day around the world.
