News
Industry marks 15 years of SMS
Stuart O'Brien Dec 5 2007, 10:37am
'Wot r u doin l8r?' was the first-ever text message, sent way back in 1992.
Actually it wasn't. It was 'Merry Christmas' and it was sent by an engineer called Neil Papworth at Airwide Solutions. He still works there today, so presumably is due a nice gold watch to commemorate the occasion.
Arguably the first proper mobile data 'product', SMS has since established itself as a multi-billion pound segment, and is a root cause of increasing childhood illiteracy.
Moreover, SMS used as a billing mechanism put the mobile content industry where it is today.
Papworth, now a principle software engineer at Airwide, said: "I was a young engineer working on new communications technologies. We thought SMS was a clever way for a company’s staff to send simple messages to one another. I’d never have predicted that it would spread into the consumer world and become what it is today. At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal."
