World marks 20 years of SMS

                                       

It’s now 20 years since the first Short Message Service by Neil Papworth on December 3, 1992 to a mobile phone.

The innovation went almost unnoticed for the next half-decade, theregister.co.uk reports.

The website reports that the SMS took a while to take hold, longer still before network operators realised what a cash cow SMS could be, and longer again before they noticed SMS was proving to be one of the most disruptive technologies ever to hit telecommunications and one whose implications they would live to regret.

On his website, Papworth explains his innovation, “In 1991, I moved to Sema Group Telecoms, and it’s with them that on December 3rd, 1992, I sent the world’s first ever text message.

“I was part of the team developing a Short Message Service Centre for our customer, Vodafone UK, and was chosen to go to their Newbury site to install, integrate and test the software and get it all working.  Initially the idea was for them to use it essentially as a paging service – no-one had any idea how gigantic the texting phenomenon would become.

“Since mobile phones didn’t yet have keyboards, I typed the message out on a PC.  It read, “Merry Christmas,” and I sent it to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, who was enjoying his office Christmas party at the time.

“I remained with Sema Group and its successors (SchlumbergerSema, Airwide Solutions) for many years as a software developer, then a designer, and later a product architect, living and working all over the world, from Singapore and Sydney to Seattle and Toronto.  Texting didn’t really take off until some years later, once handsets were able to both send and receive and people could send SMS to their friends on different networks.

“”The first media attention I remember the event receiving was when the BBC News website marked the 10th anniversary of the first text.  Since then, I’ve given radio interviews, been flown to London with my family for a movie premiere, featured in a Super Bowl ad, been an answer to a Jeopardy question and had articles written on the achievement in newspapers from The Sun to the Times of India and the Montreal Gazette.

“Who knows what the 20th anniversary will bring?”