Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer, almost unwittingly invented the Short Message System or SMS.
That’s txt 2 u and me.
In a world first, on 3 December 1992, an engineer sent the message “Merry Christmas” from a PC to a mobile device using Vodafone’s UK network.
But the origins of the idea date back further to Matti Makkonen. Over a pizza at a telecoms conference in 1984, the former Finnish civil servant put forward the idea of a mobile phone messaging service. This was to become the SMS (short message service) standard.
Dubbed the “father of SMS”- a title he dislikes because of the work others did to develop the technology – Matti Makkonen rarely gives interviews. However, he made an exception for the BBC’s tech team with an interview via SMS.
There is an interesting interview, done by text of course, by the BBC here
Filed under: History Tagged: | Matti Makkonen, SMS, text, vodafone
