Matti makkonen biography

Matti Makkonen died last week and was celebrated as the father of SMS. He’s been described as being too modest to acknowledge his involvement. It seems, however, that the story of how Short Messaging came to be is far more complicated than we originally thought, and the system has many fathers.

In fact, not only did Makkonen not invent SMS, he also reneged on an agreement with those who did to stop claiming that he did.

Makkonen’s lie – inadvertent or not – saw him recognised by the Finnish Government as one of the Great Finns, alongside composer Sibelius, and he was awarded the 1999 Economist Innovation Award alongside Tim Berners-Lee and Bill Gates.

The true story is told in the book Short Message Service (SMS): The Creation of Personal Global Text Messaging, edited by Friedhelm Hillebrand with contributions by Finn Trosby, Kevin Holley and Ian Harris.

It’s published by Wiley. Hillebrand has a chronology on his website.

The authors were all part of the teams which produced t