Gwyn D'Mello
Matti Makkonen, a Finnish national, known as the “reluctant father of SMS” has passed away at the age of 63. SMS, or Short Messaging Service, was an idea that Makkonen first suggested at a Telecoms conference in 1984, but it was only on December 3 in 1992 that the first text message was sent.
While Makkonen is widely credited with the idea for the technology, he was always one to point out that the development was a joint effort and not his sole work. In a text message interview to the BBC in 2012, one of a rare few, Makkonen said that he believed the real advent of SMS was when the Nokia 2010 handset popularised the service in 1994 with their easy-to-write messaging.
To quote a few choice bits from the piece, Makkonen said he never expected SMS to become so important on its own, but thought of it more as “another feature for the revolutionary mobile communications system,useful for quick business needs.” He was also of the opinion that, although pay-per-message SMS services wouldn’t stick around, text messaging of some sort would always have a place in communication, be it Facebook chat, Skype, and the like.
And to prove that Makkonen was a forward thinker, check out this last quote, where the interviewer asked him if he had any other big ideas for the future.
“Not my idea but integration of mobile content display to my eyeglasses would be nice. Maybe someone is working with it?”
