The very first text message was sent 20 years ago, on Dec. 3,
1992. The momentous missive? “Merry Christmas,” wrote Neil
Papworth, then a 22-year-old engineer, to Richard Jarvis, an
executive at British telecom Vodafone. Jarvis was attending his
company’s holiday party in Newbury, England, and received the
text on an Orbitel 901, which looks like this: To be precise,
this marks the 20th birthday of SMS, which stands for Short
Messaging Service. In most cases, an SMS is sent from one phone
to another on a narrow slice of cellular bandwidth called the
control channel, an ever-present connection that’s also used to
notify phones of incoming calls and signal strength. That’s one
reason why SMS has proven to be a durable form of communication
during disasters, when traffic channels, which are used for
phone calls and larger data transfers, get overloaded. The
control channel’s diminutive size is what accounts for the
strict, 160-character cap on text message length. (In turn,
that’s why Twitter, which was original