Texting is something we take for granted now and some of us are too young to even remember a time without text messaging!
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the first text message which was sent in 1992 and read “Merry Christmas.” It was sent by British engineer, Neil Papworth, who was 22 when he sent the simple message from his computer to his friend’s cell phone.
The idea of sending message through mobiles was that of Finnish civil servant,Matti Makkonen. He came up with the idea of a mobile messaging service back in 1984!
More than 150 billion texts are send each year now with the majority of texters being adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18. Over 50% of people say that they would rather text a person than call them up.
When Papworth sent his first text twenty years ago, he had no idea at all that text messaging would catch on so fast!