I’m part of that generation that grew up when everyone had a pager in high school. My friends and I used these tiny devices, which today are usually reserved for doctors and other service professionals, as our lifelines to each other. You couldn’t receive a phone call, but you could receive a notification to call someone. How could you respond? You had to find a payphone (remember that?) and a coin to call them back, or wait until you got home or on a landline (remember that too?). You could only send numbers with these earlier pager models, although my friends and I, like many others, got creative with commonly used codes and even our own unique codes.
While the ability to send words and letters via text message was finally added in the late 1990s, once cell phones became popular among the masses, the first short messaging service (SMS) was actually sent much earlier, on December 3, 1992. Engineer Neil Papworth used a home computer and sent the words “Merry Christmas” to his colleague’s phone via the Vodafone network. The first cell phone with built-in SMS functionality was the Nokia 2110, released in 1994 and which had a text limit of 160 characters. So even though texting as we know it wasn’t commercially available until later in 1999, before then it was all about the pager and clever ways of designing messages using numbers. This included lots of shorthand and even clever ways of using numbers to sound like real words.
Texting in the 90s would blow your mind
It wasn’t just text messaging, but also cell phones themselves which didn’t reach a global scale until later in the 90s. Eventually, even lucky teenagers started getting their hands on 2G phones. Before that, pagers were all the rage. The tiny receiving devices attached to your hip and could connect to a mobile network. When someone called your pager, they could leave a digital or voice message. I remember my mom leaving voicemails all the time, just saying “call me” and never just typing in her number to save me two quarters (one to listen to the message and the other to call her back).
Back in the days of pagers, you could say “goodbye” by typing “6000-843,” the closest numerical sequence resembling those letters. “Hello” was universally “07734”, which sounded like the word when a pager’s seven-segment display was held upside down. To say “I miss you,” type “1 177155 400,” with the “177” connecting to look like an “M.” You could be even more creative. My friends and I figured out how to write “shoppers,” in reference to a popular store, Shopper’s Drug Mart, to indicate that we had arrived at the mall and were waiting outside the store. There were also common quick codes that worked a bit like charades, giving you the number of letters in each word – for example, “143” for “I love you” or “424” for “call me back.” My friends and I would call our phone number with a “-1” at the end to indicate it wasn’t urgent, while “-911” meant we needed a call back immediately.
The Evolution of Text Messaging
Once you could text between devices on different networks and cell phones were more accessible to the general public, it was a game changer. Now we could type some text. But you were still constrained by a strict character limit and had to use a numeric keypad. Remember to press the “2” key three times to access “C”, the “4” key twice to access “H”, and so on. For this reason, shorthand continued because it was faster. There was a whole slang language born at the time. This saw the debut of “BRB” for “I’ll be right back”, “TTYL” for “I’ll talk to you later” and “LMK” for “let me know”.
Interestingly, a similar shortcut is still used today by the younger generation, even though smartphones have touchscreens, predictive text, voice typing, and even AI to help you write messages as long and detailed as you want. In a way, we’ve gone back to the old ways of texting. It was necessary at the time, but some prefer it today.
Despite character limitations and frustrating numeric keypads, by 2000, billions of text messages were being sent daily around the world. It wasn’t until the launch of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 that SMS also had the ability to include multimedia, such as images. Today, data and text usage far exceeds voice on mobile devices. With the rise of instant messaging, it’s clear we’ve come a long way. But it’s fun to look back on how it all started. TTFN.
