Matti Makkonen, the ‘Father of SMS’, dies at 63

Source: BBC

The man who first developed the idea of sending messages through a mobile network has died at the age of 63.Matti Makkonen was nicknamed the ‘Father of SMS’ for his pioneering efforts in initiating the technology.In 1984 he pitched the original idea for SMS over pizza at a conference in Copenhagen. At the time, Makkonen had been working as a civil servant.He didn’t receive any money for his world-changing idea when it came to fruition, because he hadn’t patented it.Although many people attribute the development of the modern communication tool to Makkonen, he was always humble and insisted it was a consolidated effort of engineers and innovators across the industry.In fact, it first took newspaper investigation to identify him as the man who first had the idea for an SMS service.He had announced in an interview on the 20th anniversary of text messaging that he believed the technology would be around in some form “forever.”His creative influence in the tech industry continued as his career developed, in 2008 he was named a winner of The Economist’s Innovation awards, for his work on the message standard.Makkonen has been described by friends and colleagues as a man whose fascination with communications technology was irrepressible, and he will be missed across the entire technology industry.