Text messages are celebrating a 30 year birthday on the 3rd of December starting life by Vodafone engineers in Berkshire England.
The first text was sent as a test and read simply “Merry Christmas”, the text was sent to Richard Jarvis, however he didn’t reply.
At the time Mr Jarvis was heralding a Orbitel 901, which weighed 2.1kg, more than a standard brick in the UK.
Up until 2010 texting wasn’t a term often used, but at it’s peak billions of them were sent every year.
Although texts are still sent, more encrypted options are now preferred, like WhatsApp and iMessage.
The isn’t to say it is a dying art though, and according to Statista 40 billion texts were sent last year alone.
That’s compared with the number of WhatsApp messages, which is about 100 billion in a single day.
Due to the protection by encryption offered through these online services, texting is seen to be more crude, however there was a time where it was the only option on a phone.
The concept of texting on a phone was thought up in the 1980’s, however took 10 years to be realised.
In the early days of the handset, keyboards on a phone didn’t exist, therefore texts had to be created by typing the letters a number of times to spell out words, with a alphabet of 26 letters and only 10 numbers available you had to be creative.
It wasn’t until much later that QWERTY keyboard or even smartphones were readily available to everyone.
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