"...the first text message is 25 years old. Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS on December 3rd, 1992, when he wrote "merry Christmas" on a computer and sent it to the cellphone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis."
I wonder if that engineer knew 25 years ago that what he did that night would change everyone's lives so much.
Today, cell phones are common. Practically everyone has one, and practically everyone texts! Don't believe me? Look it up! Text messaging is so common I had trouble sorting through all the spam Googlefoo SEO garbage to get reliable statistics.
According to Statista, text messages in the US topped 2,357 billion in 2011. That's over 2 trillion text messages, in the US alone.
We even have to make laws to keep people from texting while driving! Seriously, while driving! Like people can't figure out that that's a bad idea?
According to a NSC press release, 26% of car crashes in the us during 2014 involved cell phone use!
According to this Pew Research Center document, in 2009, 48% of teens age 12-17 say they've been in a car while the driver was texting, and 34% aged 16-17 have texted while driving! While the fact that they don't know that 12 year olds are not teens is scary enough, those statistics are even scarier!
Text messages even gave rise to Twitter, which terrifies us daily with screen grabs in news stories about what some person said, including the President of the United states! Who would have thought that 140 characters could cause such horror!
Now days though, with internet being common, we might see text messages declining, in favor of non-SMS text messages through an app! YAY!
So, Happy Birthday to the Text Message!
Don't die in a car crash responding to your mom asking if you're alright, and if you're coming home for Christmas!
Image copyright CC0 Public domain. (source)
