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The First SMS Had Just Two Words
You Have a New Message · mobile
On 3 December 1992, engineer Neil Papworth typed “Merry Christmas” on a computer and sent it to the mobile phone of Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis. Back then the phone couldn’t write, only receive.
Nobody saw it as a historic moment at the time. A few years later people were sending each other billions of messages and had invented a new language for them.
Why 160 Characters
The 160-character limit is credited to the German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand. According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1985, at home in Bonn, he typed random sentences and questions on a typewriter, counted the characters and found that they almost always fit within 160. He himself called the experiment rather unscientific. The committee later also argued that postcards usually carry fewer than 150 characters.
SMS has no single father. The Finns credit the idea to Matti Makkonen. Short messages also made use of the network’s signalling channel, which sat idle most of the time anyway.
Writing Without Diacritics
As soon as you add a character with a diacritic to a message, the phone switches encoding and only 70 characters fit into one SMS. That is why Czechs and Slovaks spent years writing “bez hacku a carek,” without háčeks and accents.
Typing was hard work, too: three or four letters on each key, and as many as three presses for a single letter. The T9 system simplified this to one press per letter. It grew out of work on a communication device for people with disabilities.
A New Language in Your Pocket
As early as 2002, linguist Lucie Hašová described the text message in the Czech journal Naše řeč as a new genre on the border between written and spoken Czech. People dropped vowels (kdklv, tm, td), borrowed English abbreviations (pls, BTW, IMHO) and wrote digits instead of syllables: o5, z5, with the Czech word for five, pět, standing in for the end of opět (“again”) and zpět (“back”).
It wasn’t only about saving space. A few years later, linguist Lucie Jílková noted that sometimes it is less about saving a character than about expressing your own creativity.
Rise and Fall
In Czechia, the number of text messages sent kept growing until 2010, when it reached 8.1 billion. In 2011 it fell for the first time. Messaging moved into apps. In 2022, according to the Czech Telecommunication Office, Czechs sent more than 5.5 billion SMS, a third fewer than in 2018. The decline, however, is slowing down.
Why SMS Hasn’t Disappeared
Today, text messages come mainly from banks, online shops and doctors. They carry verification codes, confirmations and alerts. SMS works on every phone, with no app and no internet.
Even here, though, it isn’t an ideal solution. The US standards agency NIST classifies SMS as a restricted method of authentication, because it can be abused, for example through fraudulent SIM swapping.
Two words nobody expected, and then three decades of messages. The first SMS was a Christmas greeting. Today most texts are a code you have to type in within five minutes.
