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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Technology
Alan Martin

Text messaging at 30: down, but not out

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The SMS is 30 years old

(Picture: Roman Pohorecki / Pexels)

On Saturday, the humble text message turned 30. Yes, as lore has it on 3 December, 1992 Vodafone engineer Neil Papworth sent two words to one of the company’s managers, simply reading “Merry Christmas”. Like billions of SMS messages sent in the intervening 30 years, it went unanswered.

Entering its third decade, it seems unlikely that the SMS will ever recoup the popularity it enjoyed in the early 2000s. In the UK, we sent 150.8 billion SMS and MMS messages in 2012 according to Statista, but that dropped to just 40.9 billion last year.

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