short message service

First in used in pagers that used standarised telephonic protocols as defined, reserved and allocated under the Global System for Mobile Communications in the mid-1980s, the first test missive was sent on this day in 1992 when an engineer named Neil Papworth of the Franco-German SEMA telecommunications group (now defunct) texted from his computer a Christmas greeting to a colleague at Vodafone. Though billions of such SMS circulate daily, it was initially slow to be adopted with rival carriers not allowing cross-communication until 1999―with the uptake exponential and a far more generous character-limit, albeit that these curbs IMHO compelled some real lexicographical creativity.