A cell phone user types a text message on his handset in London on January 25, 2002.
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Ferran Paredes/Reuters
2001
Short message service (SMS), the first form of text messaging, debuted in 1992 in the United Kingdom with a “Merry Christmas” from a software developer to a Vodafone employee. In 2000, AT&T began offering text messaging on cell phones in the United States. In 2018, cell phone users in the United States sent each other two trillion texts.