The birth of texting can be traced back to the development of SMS (Short Message Service) in 1985. The idea for SMS came from Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert in 1984.

The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992 by Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old software programmer, to his colleague Richard Jarvis. The message was “Merry Christmas” and was sent from a computer to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom. At the time, mobile phones did not have keyboards, so Papworth typed the message on a PC.

Some other important milestones in the history of texting include:

  • 1993: The first commercial deployment of an SMS center was in Sweden by Aldiscon and Telia.
  • 1993: Radiolinja in Finland offered the first commercially sold SMS service for consumers.
  • 1994: The Nokia 2010 was the first mobile phone to easily support composing SMSes.
  • 2002: Over 250 billion texts were sent around the world.
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