All over the globe, people send their gratitude. Text messages every day — often multiple times a day.
It is second nature for 21st-century people to type on a keyboard, no matter how small it may be, and hit “send”.
However, once upon a while it was a unique idea.
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This day in history is today.Dec. 3, 1992 was the date that the United Kingdom sent its first text message.
Neil Papworth was a 22 year-old engineer hailing from Reading, U.K. He grew up in computing.
The screen shows the first ever SMS in the world — sent on Dec. 3, 1992, to Richard Jarvis, one of the executives of British telecommunications operator Vodafone.
(Chesnot/Getty Images)
According to his website: After developing a satellite vehicle antenna for mobile vehicles, he went to work at Sema Group Telecoms.
He was part a team. A short message service is being developedVodafone U.K.
To test the paging service, Papworth was sent by the company to visit the location.
“[I]”I was chosen to go on their site to download, integrate, test and get it all working,” he stated in a website statement.
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Handheld devices at the time did not include a keyboard and the ability to send written messages.
The coding took a long time to create and Papworth was the man who got to press “send” — forever impacting how people communicate.
(Chesnot/Getty Images)
Papworth wrote the first message on a computer: “Merry christmas.”
“I entered the message on a keyboard and sent it off to an Orbitel 901 phone. He said that those things were huge.
He sent the test message to Richard Jarvis, a director at the telecommunications operator Vodafone U.K., who was attending a Christmas office party, according to Papworth’s website.
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The message was successfully sent — and Papworth became the first person to ever send a text message.
Texting is fast and easy way to communicate with people almost anywhere on the planet today.
(iStock)
Although the groundbreaking software success occurred in 1992, text messaging didn’t take off for years due to a lack of handheld keyboards.
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Papworth now lives in Montreal with his wife and three children and works for a different software company — Oracle.
It is difficult for many to believe that the messaging system “can’t-live without” was created only 30 years ago.
