When Did Texting Start? The Complete History of SMS (1984–2025)

When Did Texting Begin?

December 3, 1992. That’s the date of the first text message, and the message itself was “Merry Christmas.”

The idea behind it is older, though, so the honest answer depends on what you mean by “begin.”

Started as a spec, not a product

Nobody in the early 1980s was trying to invent texting for teenagers. Engineers working on the GSM mobile standard just wanted a way to push short notices to phones. Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert shaped the SMS concept in 1984, and Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen gets credit from some quarters for the initial idea.

The 160-character limit has a good story attached. Hillebrand is said to have typed out ordinary sentences and looked at how long they ran. Most landed under 160, so that became the cap. It stuck for decades, and it’s why early texting had that clipped feel.

The first one

Neil Papworth, then a young engineer at Sema Group, sent it from a computer to Richard Jarvis, who was at Vodafone UK holding an Orbitel 901 handset. Nothing came back. The phone could receive a text but had no way to write one.

It also went out in early December, a little ahead of the holiday it wished everyone.

Then very little happened

For years, SMS barely registered. In 1993, operators in Sweden and Finland launched the first commercial services, and Nokia phones started supporting it. Typing was the problem. Anyone who used a phone keypad back then remembers pressing 2 three times to get a C. Predictive typing (T9) helped, and around 1999 networks started connecting so you could message people on other carriers. That made it useful.

Then everything at once

The early 2000s belonged to students and teenagers, along with a new dialect of LOL and BRB. MMS added photos and video in 2002, and TV shows started asking viewers to vote by text. The iPhone arrived in 2007 with a keyboard you could actually type on, and WhatsApp followed in 2009 as an internet-based alternative to paying for texts.

After that, personal texting drifted to chat apps. Business texting didn’t. Appointment reminders, delivery alerts and payment nudges all found a home there, and in the US, companies sending from regular numbers now have to register them (10DLC). In 2024 Apple finally added RCS to the iPhone, so texts between iPhone and Android can carry read receipts and sharper photos.

Quick timeline

Where it fits now

People open texts fast, which is why businesses keep using them. SMS covers every phone, and WhatsApp works better when photos and international reach matter. If your customer records live in Salesforce, MessageBlink handles both channels there, so the messages and opt-ins sit on the record.