Today, with the spread of mobile data and the introduction of messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, the shoe of SMS was thrown into our lives. Today, although SMS is only used for campaign messages from brands and similar works, the situation was very different until a few years ago.
From the early ’90s until the mid-2000s, SMS was the most popular system many people used for messaging. Vodafone, the owner of the first short message that started the SMS trend all over the world, announced that it would convert this message into NFT and sell it.
The story of the first SMS
The person who sent the first SMS is Neil Papworth.
In 1992, Vodafone, the British operator giant, was testing an unusual feature for those years. The company was going to use this system, which they called SMS (Short message service), to inform users from operators at first. The British engineer Neil Papworth, who was assigned to test this feature, sent the first SMS in history to Richard Jarvis, the company manager at that time, on 3 December 1992. The message sent from the computer to the phone read “Happy Birthday”.
Of course, not everyone could use this feature, which was still in the testing phase at that time. For this reason, there was no response to Papwoeth’s message. Vodafone, on the other hand, decided to turn the first SMS sent 29 years ago into NFT.
Proceeds will be donated to charities
It has been announced that all of the proceeds from NFT, which is planned to be sold by the Aguttes Auction House in France with an auction to be held on December 21, will be donated to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In the sale to be made with Ethereum, this NFT is expected to be sold at a record price.
Ahmed Essam, CEO of Vodafone UK, said: “We are proud to combine a great technology innovation from our past with the latest technology of today to help people who need support. This initiative embodies our spirit of ‘We Can Do It Together’” and explained the purpose of the project.
Essam also explained that whoever owns the NFT will also have a detailed copy of the original communication protocol.
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