Text messaging hits 20 years. . . LOL

It started, appropriately enough, with a message of festive cheer. Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group, in Newbury, Berkshire, used a personal computer to send a 'Merry Christmas' greeting to Richard Jarvis, via the Vodafone network on December 3, 1992.

They were building on a concept first developed in the Franco-German GSM cooperation in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. The SMS message – Short Messaging System – sparked a revolution.

Papworth said: "I'd never have predicted that it would spread into the consumer world and become what it is today. At the time it didn't seem like a big deal."

Though the SMS was sent in 1992, it was a further four years before text messaging became commercially available.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Back in 1996, the average number of texts sent by American users each month was 0.4. By 2000, the figure had written to 35 per person per month. Today, one in 10 people send as many as 6,000 text messages a month. More than half of Americans sent 1,500 per month – while 10 per cent send more than 6,000 per month, with trillions sent across the world every day.

Texting has changed the way we live – and speak. More than four million people living in the UK have experienced a text-related injury – a problem stemming from the size of mobiles, with people suffering sore wrists, numb fingers and other injuries.

In the USA, a tow-truck driver crashed his truck into a swimming pool – because he was texting while driving. Nicholas Sparks, 25, was charged with reckless driving.

Texting hasn't simply led to injuries, however. A British doctor volunteering in the Congo used SMS instructions from a colleague to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy. Vascular surgeon David Nott helped the 16-year-old while working 24-hour shifts with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in Rutshuru.

Texting is such big business in the USA that the country even hosts a texting championship. Fifteen-year-old Kate Moore won the LG US National Texting Championship, after sending 14,000 texts per month, landing a winners' cheque of $50,000.

A Finnish author wrote an entire book in a text message, a teenager in the USA fell into a manhole while texting, countless celebrities have got into trouble for sexting, 27-year-old British woman Melissa Thompson set a world record by sending a 26-word message in 25.94 seconds while Deepak Sharma set a Guinness Book Record for sending 182,689 messages in a month – that's 6,100 per day.

Texting earns mobile networks more than £100 billion per year.

And it remains very much a central part of life in 2012, despite a small drop in the number of UK texts sent this year because of the rise of other mediums such as Facebook and Twitter. A report released today by watchdog Ofcom has revealed many of us are likely to echo the very first SMS message by saying "Merry Christmas" this year by text rather than the spoken word.

Ofcom's James Thickett said: "When texting was first conceived many saw it as nothing more than a niche service.

"But texts have now surpassed traditional phone calls and meeting face to face as the most frequent way of keeping in touch."

Professor Matt Jones of the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University, is optimistic about the way technology is changing behaviour. He said: "You only have to look at the joy, energy and fun at the Olympics to see people crave company and shared experience.

"Texting doesn't make people less social it just changes how we keep connected."