Evolution of the "Text Message"

Evolution of the "Text Message"

The phrase text message has evolved to have a completely different meaning than the array of objects it used to represent.

At one point, the phrase text message used to refer to a tangible piece of paper that had some sort of writing on it.  The word was first recorded in the news papers on October of 1920 in the New York Times.  Ironically, the article is about the evolution of the telephone, one of the key replacements of messages that were actually sent by text. The article explains how telecommunications have evolved to the point that allows users to communicate from across the ocean.  The evolution of the telephone is explained, tracing communication all the way back to one of the first ways to spread a message, by sending an actual piece of text. In 1920, the thought of being able to send an electronic message to a different device would be absurd.

The emergence of the phrase "text message" that we have all become so familiar with, first appeared in a scholarly article from Transactions of Software Engineering in 1987.  This article describes the conceptual model of implementing inter-organization communication through messages on computers. At this point in 1987 it is just highlighting the theoretical possibility of sending mail electronically via the computer.  It was around five years later when the first text message was sent. Since than, new forms of text message and text communications have evolved to the point of being arguably more useful than voice communication.

It is amazing how the phrase "text message" was initially such a universally understandable term, but if you travel back 50 years, society would be completely ignorant to what your description of what a text message entails.