Without texting we wouldn’t know how to tell people something is hilarious (LOL) in 3 letters. This process, which started with SMS, has been moved to the messaging platforms we use today and emojis have replaced the facial expressions we make with periods, commas and parentheses.
Known as the Short Message Service or SMS, the technology began 30 years ago (December 1992) with a 16-character “Merry Christmas” message sent by Neil Papworth, a programmer working on mobile messaging technology. But it would take almost another 10 years for the messaging and expressions to take the society by storm.
It would not be wrong to say that we should thank Blackberry for the widespread use of messaging. Millennials and their idols carried their BlackBerrys and other feature phones with physical keyboards as talismans. In our country, Nokia and Ericsson were the most used phones with physical keyboards.
While the subsequent iPhone didn’t play a role in the initial adoption of the SMS culture, it (and Android phones) helped drive the transformation from a largely text-based SMS culture to one filled with graphic emojis.
Now, 30 years later, SMS messaging has forever changed the way people communicate. How we will be texting in 30 years is uncertain for now, but it is clear that it will not be through smoke. For a while, at least…
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