Did you know that the first text message was sent 25 years ago? Engineer Neil Papworth sent “Merry Christmas” to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis on December 3, 1992. Neil Papworth was part of the team developing a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for Vodafone UK. He was assigned to test the software originally intended to be used as a paging service. Little did they know that text messaging would become a phenomenon.

Looking back 10 years ago, text messaging in the Philippines almost replaced pagers and telephones and has become the preferred means of communication. In 2007, Smart’s standard text messages totaled 25,492 million in a year while Globe’s network is processing over 384 million SMS messages per day.