“This Roast Is Absolutely Eternal”: 40 Of The Funniest Text Conversations That Made People Laugh (New Pics)

Who doesn't have a smartphone and isn't able to text people nowadays? I wish I could say that it's someone's grandma, but Millennials' grandparents often are sporting iPhones, too. According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, 90% of Americans have a smartphone. The same percentage of the population also claims they go online every day, and 41% say they're online "almost constantly."

But there was a time when people would communicate in other ways. In 2021, Americans sent two trillion text and multimedia messages. But the first-ever text message was sent in 1992 by Neil Papworth. Back then, he was a 22-year-old software programmer based in the UK, working to create the Short Message Service (SMS) for Vodafone.

What did Neil's first-ever text message say? Because it was sent to one of his colleagues and it was 3rd December, the message read: "Merry Christmas." At the beginning, text messages had a character limit, similar to Twitter. A person could write a text containing a maximum of 160 characters. That's what led to people inventing "txt spk" or text speak. Today, we can't really imagine daily communication through messages without abbreviations like LOL, ROFL, brb, idk, emojis, GIFs, and even memes.

"In 1992, I had no idea just how popular texting would become, and that this would give rise to emojis and messaging apps used by millions," Papworth said in a later interview. "It didn't feel momentous at all. For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."

Although it didn't seem momentous at the time, it certainly changed the way we communicate. Interestingly, at the time that the first text messages were sent, cellphones couldn't exactly send a reply message back. Papworth sent the text message from a computer to his colleague Richard Jarvis's phone. Yet, only a year later did Nokia develop the first cellphone with a texting feature. Until 1999, people could only send SMS texts to each other if they were clients of the same mobile provider. 

When we talk about texting nowadays, we mean all forms of instant messaging. Whether on a messaging app like WhatsApp or Messenger, dating apps like Hinge or Tinder, or through the chat function on Reddit, people choose them over the traditional old-school texting that has been out of style for quite some time. How did people move from the default messaging app to social media direct messages?