What do you think of this fact?
No “omw,” no “lol,” no emoji. The very first text message in history was two words long: “Merry Christmas.” And it wasn’t even typed on a phone.
Holiday greetings from a desk
On December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer, was sitting at a regular computer. He worked for Sema Group, building a short message service center for the British carrier Vodafone. As a test, he sent the message from the PC over Vodafone’s GSM network.
The recipient was Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director who was at his office Christmas party at the time. The greeting popped up on his Orbitel 901. According to NPR, that phone weighed over 4.5 pounds. Your smartphone weighs a tiny fraction of that.
Texting back? Not an option
Here’s the funny part: Jarvis couldn’t reply. Phones back then simply had no way to write text messages. So the first SMS was a one-way street.
Papworth himself didn’t think it was a big deal. According to Wikipedia, he later said it didn’t feel momentous at all. And he told NPR he spelled out “Merry Christmas” in full, not “X-mas.”
Why a text has 160 characters
Someone actually thought hard about how long a text should be. Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the people who developed SMS, looked at how long typical postcards and telex messages were. His conclusion: 160 characters is enough for most messages.
The limit came straight from the analog world: Hillebrand used postcards and telex messages as his benchmark.
One single test greeting turned into something as everyday as brushing your teeth. Not bad for two words that were just meant to brighten up an office party.