Happy Birthday SMS! Texting Celebrates A Massive Milestone Today

Happy Birthday Text Message!

Today marks 20 years since the first text message was sent to a mobile phone.

The first SMS was sent on December 3, 1992, when a 22-year-old British engineer called Neil Papworth, an employee of the technology company Sema, used his computer to send the message "Merry Christmas" to an Orbitel 901 mobile phone.

Texting has now surpassed the traditional phone call as the most common method of staying in touch.

Speaking to Sky News, Mr Papworth said he never thought that texting would become so popular.

"Back then I had no idea, I was just doing a day's testing. It wasn't until the 10th anniversary that I realised and thought 'Wow, that was a big thing'.

"And here we are another 10 years later and text messaging has gone on to even bigger and better things now."

In fact, most of us are now more likely to text a friend than to pick up the phone or have a face-to-face conversation with them.

The Irish are known to be avid texters...

But the first half of 2012 saw two quarterly declines in the volume of SMS messages sent in the UK. At the beginning of the year, The Irish Independent also reported on predictions that text messaging rates in Ireland would decline too.

The drop is being put down to the rise in web-based communications - many of which are freely available on smartphones and tablets like WhatsApp, Blackberry Messenger, iMessenger, Google Talk and MSN Messenger.

An increase in communication through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is also thought to be having an impact.

Texting caused controversy in Ireland during the summer when mobile phone users realised it was cheaper to send a photo in a message than a fada, as fadas used more data.

SMS stands for Short Messaging Service and a message is traditionally under 160 characters in length.