The First Text Message Said Merry Christmas (opens in new tab)

The first text message ever sent was not a love note, a meeting reminder, or a meme. It was a Christmas greeting. On December 3, 1992, a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth sat at a desktop computer, typed two words, and sent the world's first SMS to a mobile phone: "Merry Christmas." More than thirty years later, that humble two-word message has grown into one of the most quietly important protocols in connected technology, and it still shows up in the IoT devices we build today. The en...