The first text message ever sent was a Christmas greeting.
On 3 December 1992 engineer Neil Papworth sent two words from a computer to a colleague's phone: 'Merry Christmas'.
More amazing facts
- 1990 · 1993 Hubble's mirror was ground wrong by 2.2 micrometres, dozens of times thinner than a hair.
- 1991 The world's first webcam watched a coffee pot. In 1991 Cambridge University computer scientists pointed a camera at their coffee machine so colleagues would not make a wasted trip to an empty pot.
- 1991 A single eruption cooled the whole planet.
- 1991 · 1992 Sergei Krikalev left Earth from the USSR and came back to Russia.
- 1992 Nollywood began with a videotape trader.
- 1994 · 1995 The record for the longest single spaceflight, 437 days, belongs to the physician Valeri Polyakov.