The first text message said 'Merry Christmas'

On 3 December 1992, 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS text message from a computer to Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 mobile phone on the Vodafone network in the UK. The message read: 'Merry Christmas'. Mobile handsets couldn't reply yet — that capability came in 1993. SMS was initially dismissed by carriers as a niche technical feature; by 2010 the world was sending 6 billion texts per day. The original Orbitel 901 used to receive the first message was sold at auction in 2021 for £178,500.

Source: Finn, The Story of the World's First Text Message, BBC News (2012)