S(hort) M(essage) S(ervice)

I love the smell of geekery in the morning, don’t you?

Think back to the early 1990s when we had to call each other. Or even further back when you had to arrange to meet outside Our Price or the Wimpy Bar. How did we manage it?

The first text message I sent was in 1996 to my friend who also had this super-duper new fangled techonology. I think I sent “hello”. So original.

Since then a lot has changed and in the UK we now send 215 million texts per day and a stunning 79 billion per year.

The immense popularity of texts took phone companies by surprise. Initially seen as a minor feature, by the end of the decade “txting” was a function you just couldn’t live without.

The first SMS text message was sent on 3 December 1992 by engineer Neil Papworth. It read “Happy Christmas”. Soppy g*t.

Now synonymous with teenages, txting has evolved its own language which I cannot keep up with.

Initially created to save character limits set by the mobile phone companies, SMS has now opened up to more characters yet txt spk continue to evolve…

<3, @TEOTD, BBL, BBF, TTFN, TTYN, LOL, ROFL, OMFG, OMFGLMAOBBQROFL, AAAGGGHHHHH!

If you still want to know the full set, you can read it all at webopedia.com and there is a great resource on SMS at (none other than) Wikipedia… wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS.

TTFN x