Paris, December 21 (BNA): The world’s first SMS text message was put up for auction on Tuesday as a digital piece of history, German news agency (dpa) reported.
The SMS item is subject to the hammer at the Aguttes auction house in Paris as a non-fungible token (NFT), which means it has a digital certificate of authenticity and is considered the original.
Anyone with the code – secured by blockchain technology – will be the verifiable digital owner of the SMS.
Vodafone programmer Neil Papworth sent the letter in December 1992 to a colleague who got it while at a company Christmas party.
The message says “Happy Birthday”.
These digital testimonials are growing in popularity: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.9 million at auction earlier this year, while Tim Berners-Lee’s first source code for the World Wide Web fetched $5.4 million.
The auction proceeds for SMS are likely to be much lower. The auction house is expecting between 100,000 and 200,000 euros ($113,000 to $266,000).
Maximilien Aguttes, Director of Development, is still hoping for a higher final bid.
“This first text message received in 1992 is a historic testament to human and technological progress,” Agutes said.
Vodafone is an NFT seller and plans to donate the proceeds to UNHCR.
For legal reasons, the winning bidder will receive tangible assets along with SMS, including a digital photo frame to display in it.
Despite alternatives like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, the programmer, who sent the first SMS in 1992, believes in the future of SMS.
“The death of SMS was announced 20 years ago, but it’s still there – and it will be here in the future,” Papworth, 51, told dpa in Montreal.
“Next year, the SMS will be 30 years old, and after that I think we will also celebrate her 40th birthday.”
The demand for SMS has weakened in the past few years as many consumers have switched to using messaging apps instead.
However, Papworth said these services were not relevant to some segments of the population. “When I ask some friends something on Facebook Messenger, they answer after two weeks; when I text them, they answer right away,” Papworth said.
Other friends no longer use SMS, but only messaging services. “I know what method to use for anyone,” he said.
In general, it is believed that SMS will continue to be important in the future for the elderly and countries with poor network infrastructure.
In the 1990s, Papworth was working in England for the Sema Group, an information technology company that had been providing technical and programming services to Vodafone. “We wrote their original texting system,” he said. Presently, he lives in Canada and works for another IT company as he is no longer in touch with telecom issues.
Papworth recalls that SMS was announced by some experts as a phase-out model already 20 years ago, when cell phones with email functionality entered the market. Later, smartphones and messaging applications became alternatives to SMS.
While demand has weakened, “people still use it, it’s still a huge part of mobile networks. You’re thinking, they should use other methods, but they don’t.”
Regarding the auction he said: “He will bring money to charity and someone will be happy to buy it – that’s a good result and it’s a good thing.”
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