The world’s first text message just sold for $156K thanks to someone in Canada

Owning a piece of digital history doesn’t come cheap. Way back on December 3rd, 1992, a software developer named Neil Papworth sent the world’s first text message, and just this month, the text was sold at an auction for over $156,000 CAD.

Papworth, who was a computer programmer for Vodafone at the time and now lives in Quebec, typed the words “Merry Christmas” into a computer and sent the message to a phone at a Vodafone Christmas party in England, he told CTV.

The original SMS text and the communication code that was used to send it was sold at a Paris-based auction house as an NFT earlier this month.

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One tech enthusiast shelled out 107,000 euros for the NFT, which was put up for auction by Vodafone. All of the proceeds were donated to the UN Refugee Agency.

One of the employees of the auction house told CTV that the phone that the text message was sent to was practically a cement brick, weighing around 4.4 lbs.

According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), over 2.1 trillion text messages were exchanged in the U.S. alone in 2020, which is an increase of 52 billion from the previous year.

Needless to say, we’ve definitely come a long way since 1992.