Though it was conceptually based on a much older collection of technologies, including wireless telegraphy. The text message,

a written message typed out on a cellular telephone or other device, didn't emerge in its

modern form until 1984, when the Global Systems for Modern Communication, or GSM standard,

was developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

This standard defined the protocols for second-generation cellular network functionality,

which would upgrade the increasingly popular first-generation networks,

that allowed early mobile phones to operate using analog telecommunications standards.

In essence, old school analog phone lines were augmented in the 1980s to allow for basic

mobile communications. But this new 2G setup was drummed up to replace those analog signals

with digital signals, increasing the quality of voice calls,

but also allowing for other add-on services, like texting.

GSM, then, was the new 2G standard that replaced the old, hacked-together 1G standard for mobile

telephone service.

Short message service, or SMS, was built alongside and released as part of that larger GSM standard,

which meant that this new digital mobile service would allow users to send 160-character text messages to each other, alongside standard phone functionality.

The first test SMS message was sent in December of 1992 in the UK, though it was typed out on a desktop computer and sent to someone using a GSM-based telephone handset.

So a modern phone, in the sense that it held a SIM card and connected to the 2G telephone

service, but super antique-looking by today's standards, with a coiled cable connecting the

handset to a base, a giant antenna growing out of one side, and the whole contraption

taking up about as much space as a chunky waffle iron. That first text message, by the way,

was Merry Christmas. Throughout the next decade, the service slowly became available on networks

around the world as the requisite hardware began to roll out to the backbone

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