Merry Christmas: The first SMS was sent On December 3, 1992

On December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth sent the first SMS in history; That text message contained a Christmas greeting and a good reason for it.

On a day like today, but 30 years ago, a young man sent a somewhat dismissive text message (“ Merry Christmas ”), which went down in history. Wasn't that December 3, 1992, a little early to greet the Holidays? It's okay that a few days later, the tree had to be assembled, but: wasn't it a lot? Yes and no. The reason was clear: Richard Jarvis, the person to whom this very brief message was addressed, was in his office, having a somewhat early Christmas meeting with his colleagues.

It was a good time because Jarvis was with his cell phone nearby (an Orbitel 901, "valise" model, relatively common at that time). And he received the message and confirmed receipt (and, we suppose, thanked the greeting, although that information had been lost), but he did it with another phone. With a voice call. Why did he call him? Because that Orbitel 901 was the first cell phone in history capable of receiving text messages... but not sending them. In fact, no mobile phones could send an SMS simply because the service did not yet exist: the Vodafone telephone company in England was preparing it.

The Orbitel used to send the first SMS by Vodafone GSM service.

That text message was, in fact, the first-ever. The catcher: Richard Jarvis. The sender: Neil Papworth, a young 22-year-old engineer working at the French firm Sema, who had the contract to develop Vodafone's SMS system, and who wanted to prove that the system he had been working on for months actually worked. . So: why wait? He sent the message, and that's it.

But Papworth didn't use a cell phone: he sent the message from a PC. He had no alternative: it was not until 1993 that the first cell phones capable of sending and receiving text messages appeared, which at that time were limited to the same company; It would take several years for it to become an interoperable standard, first in Europe, that is, to allow messages to be sent between cell phones from different companies, like email. But that was the future: the present of that December 1992 was that you could only receive messages sent from some kind of computer interface.

Today, SMS seems to us somewhat obsolete, but at that time, it was something unprecedented: instant messengers did not even exist (the first, ICQ, was born in 1996; MSN Messenger is from 1999), so there was not even the concept of instant communication by text, except for those who have ever used an IRC chat room (a cascade of messages similar to comments on a Twitch or YouTube stream, but only text) or a beeper (also called a pager), popular among doctors and later extended to more sectors of the population ( by the way, the pager completed half a century of service in 2019 ).

"We thought it was going to be a kind of pager for executives, " Papworth told LA NACION. People were already used to carrying an analog cell phone and a pager; with this, they could use a single device for both tasks. And it would also allow you to receive a text notification that you had voice messages instead of showing a symbol on the screen. We knew that eventually, it would be possible to send messages (that came a year later), but at first, you could only receive them.

Thus, on December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth, an Englishman, a computer fanatic since his parents had bought him a Sinclair ZX80 at the age of ten, went down in history with a two-word message. "It was like that because the Vodafone office was celebrating Christmas early," he recalled. "I don't know what his reaction was, but I had someone next to me who was on the phone with another person in that office, next to Jarvis, who confirmed that the message had arrived."

Papworth, who today lives in Montreal with his wife and three children, was instrumental in initiating a technology that is present in all cell phones today... but that he couldn't use back then. Papworth even had a cell phone. “It took several years before I bought one. I had no need. None of my friends had either -he explained-. And they were quite expensive. Even sending text messages could only be done between users of the same company, which was about 10 pence each.

 When Neil Papworth was 22 years old, he sent the first SMS in history.

A new way of communicating

With that 1992 text message, Papworth inaugurated a concept that European mobile phone operators had been working on since the first proposal in 1984, to take advantage of an internal signaling system that telephone networks had, and that 90 percent of the time, he was idle. But that communication channel had many limitations, so it was useless for long texts, like those that could already be sent by mail. So it fell on the German Friedhelm Hillebrand and the French Bernard Ghillebaert of the GSM consortium (dedicated to developing mobile phone standards for the whole of Europe) to find the right extension. They tried short texts inspired by postcards and telex (a telegram-type system for corporate use) to reach 128 characters and then the 160 characters that SMSes have today.

It was a revolutionary idea. Today it seems obvious to us that the cell phone is more than just a pocket phone (in fact, the least we do is use it as a phone), but back then, cell phones did nothing else. With SMS, a different way of communicating was also born: sending an SMS was cheaper than making a call (even though you paid for each text message sent), and it allowed asynchronous communication, the convenience of which had already been successfully demonstrated by the email, that is to say: you could send a message and not force the other to respond at the moment, as in a call. It also laid the foundations for messengers like WhatsApp. In fact, the founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, cited the difficulties in sending an SMS from Argentina as one of the reasons that motivated him to create the messenger.

At its peak, millions of SMS messages were sent per day ( more than 7.5 billion in July 2011 in Argentina alone ), systems were saturated for New Year, and things like that. There was a time when SMS, and the language changes (above all, abbreviations) generated by its 160-character limit and the absence of a full keyboard, was seen as something negative: a distortion of the language that came to be treated to condense a longer text into fewer letters, and incidentally avoid the torture of typing it with a numeric keypad (at least until Cliff Kushler invented the T9, the predictive keyboard for devices without a full keyboard).

Today SMS is used less because most of our textual communication runs through platforms that do not depend on that channel without original use but rather go directly to the Internet. One more string of bits, indistinguishable (in transmission) from accessing a web page or a post on social networks. Everything is going the same way, and it seems logical to us.

Papworth went down in history with the early Christmas greeting: his name will always be associated with a new way of communicating, with the idea that a short text message is many times more useful or efficient than a call. Does it give him at least some celebrity among his family or friends? Not much, he admitted, but for a good reason, stemming from that message he sent 30 years ago. “My children have grown up with messengers, e-mail, and the ability to send texts. By the time they had their first cell phones, they were already using other messaging platforms before SMS, which they rarely use. Previous generations grew up with none of it, so when the text came, it was a revelation .”