That telegram was sent by Samuel Morse,
the message in question – “What hath God
wrought?” from the Book of Numbers –
travelling from Washington D.C. to Vail, Maryland.
And with that, the human appetite was
whetted for a whole new world of immediate
communication that eventually helped to bring
into being the telephone, radio, fax, pager and
other technologies that we would go on to take
for granted.
But what about those eventual technologies
that especially closely resembled the
‘instant messaging’ we now know, love and
occasionally hate? Well, a key precursor to not
only 21st-century instant messaging but also
the likes of email and SMS (text) messaging,
was unquestionably the Compatible Time-
Sharing System (CTSS) that was created at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1961. Admittedly, the system was all
connected by wire and the as many as 30 people
it enabled to chat together at a time were in the
same room, but it was at least a start.
It took until 1992, however, for the first-ever
text message to be sent – by a Vodafone
engineer, simply reading “Merry Christmas”.
From there, the developments came
progressively thicker and faster; 1996 saw the
launch by Israeli firm Mirabilis of ICQ, which
was the first text-based messenger to achieve
a serious audience online. It incorporated both
chatroom-like functionality and the opportunity
for one-to-one interactions that we associate
with instant messaging today, its success
meaning that it was acquired by AOL for a
staggering $400 million just two years later.Image: Julie Allocco