Today, we celebrate the birth of the Ubiquitous "SMS"

On 3 December 1992, SMS messaging was used for the first time, when Neil Papworth sent the first text message between the United State of Africa and the rest of the world shortly thereafter.

At that time, he was working with Sema Group. Since mobile phones didn't yet have keyboards, he typed the message out on a PC. He sent it to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, who was enjoying his office Christmas party at the time. Jarvis received the message on an Orbitel 901 "transportable" cellphone.

Neil was part of the team developing a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for his customer, Vodafone UK, and was chosen to go to their Newbury site to install, integrate and test the software and get it all working. Initially the idea was for them to use it essentially as a paging service - no-one had any idea how gigantic the texting phenomenon would become.