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On the same day that Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" topped the charts as the #1 song in the US and "Home Alone 2" dominated the box office, history was quietly made in the world of communication. On December 3, 1992, 22-year-old software architect Neil Papworth sent the world's first SMS text message (SMS = Short Message Service).
Although the concept of SMS technology was originally developed in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert while working for the GSM Corporation, it would take nearly a decade for the technology to be implemented.
The first SMS message was sent by Neil Papworth, then working at the Sema Group, using a computer to type out the message "Merry Christmas." The message traveled over Vodafone's GSM network in the UK and was received by a Vodafone employee using an Orbitel 901 mobile phone, which, at the time, resembled a hefty cordless phone rather than today's sleek smartphones.
"I don't know if they really thought it was going to be a big thing," Papworth told Sky News.
The following year, in 1993, Nokia became the first company to include SMS functionality in its GSM mobile phones, enabling consumers to send text messages directly from one handset to another. However, adoption was slow at first. In 1995, network traffic data showed that the average GSM customer sent just 0.4 SMS messages per month – a far cry from the mass adoption that would follow.
By the early 2000s, SMS had become a global phenomenon, transforming the way people communicated. By 2010, an estimated 6.1 trillion SMS messages were sent worldwide, which equates to a staggering average of 193,000 messages per second.
Today, billions of text messages are still sent every day, but the dominance of true SMS is challenged by messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, WeChat, Signal, and Telegram, to name a few.
These apps offer richer functionality, including multimedia messaging, group chats, and end-to-end encryption. While SMS remains widely used, particularly in regions with less internet access or for services like two-factor authentication, the trend has shifted toward these more versatile platforms.