“Merry Christmas” Neil Papworth’s typed the first text message 15 years ago, starting a ‘cultural phenomenon’


05sms265.jpgLike “Mr. Watson, come here,” (the first words spoken over the telephone) does not sound exciting, “Merry Christmas” sounds complacent for the first text message in the world to be sent to a cellphone. Neil Papworth was the man who did the deed and admits that “it struck him as fittingly festive”, at that time. Richard Jarvis, the man who received the transmission, was at a Christmas party near Vodafone headquarters in Newbury, England, when the mother of all text messages was about to land 15 years ago this week.
Since cellphones were not yet designed to type out and send individual letters of the alphabet, Papworth (pictured above), then a 22-year-old engineer sent his historic greeting to Jarvis’s phone from a computer keyboard. It took some time for cellphones to evolve into ones that were capable of sending and receiving messages. At that point of time I’m sure Papworth would have never thought that there would come a time when billions of messages would fly through the airwaves. In fact text messages have given birth to a new script. U get wht I m syng, rt?


“It is a cultural phenomenon,” said Mike Short, chairman of the Mobile Data Association in England, where the number of text messages sent each week just passed one billion, about 25 percent higher than a year earlier. Experts have not been able to put a reliable figure on the revenue generated for operators via text messages. Here is a cheerful anecdote that Papworth recollects: A year ago, he was pleased to be able to use group texting to announce the birth of his daughter to a dozen friends around the world at once with a single message, he said. He was chagrined to hear, however, that when a friend told his daughter that he knew the man who sent the first SMS, the daughter replied, “He’s still alive?”
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