32 years ago today, personal communication changed forever

Right now, text messaging is better than it’s ever been. Don’t get us wrong — there’s still ample room for improvement — but with RCS really coming into its own, especially in terms of iOS RCS adoption, the state of the communication landscape today is a vast improvement over what it looked like just a few years back. We’re thinking about this momentum in particular today because of the significance of the date, as we celebrate the anniversary of the first text message ever sent.

In the early ’90s, cell phones were just starting to flirt with the idea of going digital, and the very first GSM networks entered testing. Beyond just supporting digital voice calls, these networks allowed devices to begin communicating with each other by sending small text strings — this was the beginning of the Short Message Service, or SMS. And on December 3, 1992, the first SMS text alert popped up on the screen of a cell phone. This was still so early that we wouldn’t even get an audible “ding” with an incoming text for another year.

To be fair, this was a far cry from the sort of off-the-cuff mobile texting that we think about today, and instead involved a desktop computer on the originating end. Neil Papworth, a Vodafone engineer at the time, sent the very first text message from his PC to a GSM handset on the carrier’s nascent network. And this being December and all, Papworth went with a seasonally appropriate greeting: “Merry Christmas.”

Today we’ve got dozens upon dozens of ways for you to communicate with friends and family — hell, Google alone has five of them. Pretty much every social network has its own person-to-person solution, to say nothing of all the dedicated messaging services like Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp. In light of all those, SMS feels positively archaic, yet its power lies in its simplicity and longevity. Even now, 32 years later, those 160 short characters are still helping us stay connected.