Merry Christmas – It’s been 30 years since the first text message on a phone  

A simpler time…

Texting is celebrating its 30th birthday this Christmas! The first text message was sent to the legendary Orbitel 901 by a Vodafone engineer in Berkshire, UK and of course… it never got a reply.

At its peak, SMS or Short Message Service was used billions of times a year and in 2010 the word “texting” entered the English dictionary.

The service is still used today, although it is now based on the internet. But encrypted services like WhatsApp and iMessage are much more popular. In 2021, 40 billion SMS were sent in the UK, a significant drop from 150 billion SMS in 2012. 100 billion messages are sent worldwide on WhatsApp per day!

Initially SMS messages consisted of text only, up to 160 characters. The idea had been around since 1980 but it took almost a decade to come to fruition. Most phones back then had numeric keypads with two or three letters attached to each number. For example, to write the letter C, one had to press the number 1 three times.