After having done everything from sealing multi-national deals to shattering lovelorn hearts during the last two decades, text messaging volumes have declined for the first time since their inception, a new report has found.
From a tiny start with the world's first message - the words "Merry Christmas" sent from a personal computer to a mobile phone - on December 3, 1992, the use of texts exploded after 1998 when the UK's four major mobile-phone companies introduced "pay-as-you-go".
Now four billion people around the globe use SMS - Short Message Service
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