Text messaging turns 20 today  ‘Merry Christmas’: The Text
Message Turns 20 Today  It was 20 years ago today that the very
first text message was sent.  On December 3, 1992, Neil
Papworth, an engineer working in the UK, sent the world’s first
short message service or SMS. It read “Merry Christmas.” Since
then, an estimated 8 trillion texts have been sent, and texting
has become one of our primary means of communication.  The
origins of texting date back to 1984 when Matti Makkonen, a
Finnish civil servant, put forward the idea at a telecoms
conference. He is called the “father of SMS” for floating the
idea, though he dislikes the identifier because many others
worked hard to develop the technology. He rarely gives
interviews but made a text-only exception with the BBC today.
You can read that here.  Then came 22-year-old Neil Papworth,
who in 1992 was working for a company called Semea Group
Telecoms. The company was working on a text messaging project
for European cellular carrier Vodafone.   Indeed, it didn