Monday 3 December 2012

The first text message was sent on 3rd December 1992

"The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992, when the 22-year-old British engineer Neil Papworth used his computer to wish a "Merry Christmas" to Richard Jarvis, of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Papworth didn't get a reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone in those days. That had to wait for Nokia's first mobile phone in 1993.
The first text messages were free and could only be sent between people on the same network, but in 1994 Vodafone – then one of only two mobile networks in the UK – launched a share price alert system. The arrival in 1995 of the Tegic (aka T9) system, which created "predictive" texting based on the letters you had typed, meant texting could take off.
Commercial services soon followed, and though they started life as a free service – because operators hadn't figured out how to charge for them – it was quickly realised there was money to be made from texting as the number rose dramatically. By February 2001 the UK was sending one billion texts a month, which at the standard 10p-a-text charge meant the business was raking in about £100m a month.
The amount of data in a text message is tiny, at just 128 bytes. Charged at the same price per byte, a 650MB music CD would cost more than £60,000."

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