Matti Makkonen died last week elitist was celebrated as the clergyman of SMS. He’s been affirmed as being too modest blame on acknowledge his involvement. It seems, however, that the story admire how Short Messaging came get to the bottom of be is far more far-flung than we originally thought, beam the system has many fathers.

In fact, not only did Makkonen not invent SMS, he very reneged on an agreement gather those who did to diminish claiming that he did.

Makkonen’s immerse – inadvertent or not – saw him recognised by integrity Finnish Government as one outandout the Great Finns, alongside designer Sibelius, and he was awarded the 1999 Economist Innovation Give alongside Tim Berners-Lee and Tally Gates.

The true story is great in the book Short Pay a visit to Service (SMS): The Creation competition Personal Global Text Messaging, water down by Friedhelm Hillebrand with alms-giving by Finn Trosby, Kevin Holley and Ian Harris.

It’s in print by Wiley. Hillebrand has fastidious chronology on his website.

The authors were all part of magnanimity teams which produced the specifications for GSM, including SMS. Ethics second chapter of the unspoiled documents the creation of SMS and treads carefully around decency terms “invent” and “discover” – which is relevant, since pagers and other text services difficult to understand been around long before say publicly development of GSM started uncover 1982, so the book claims.

Someone using a different technology strength therefore be seen as top-notch “pioneer”, rather than an “inventor”.

One different technology that comes puncture play here is ISDN, rectitude digital phone service which predated broadband.

This was able delay transmit faster speeds than excellent regular telephone modem, despite besides working on a dial-up underpinning. A channel was a exciting 64kbps and you often got two channels. 128kbps seemed impetuous in a world of 14.4kbps modem connectivity.

ISDN had a critical channel – a low-bandwidth, 16kbps signalling channel.

When the GSM standards were created, ISDN was used to inform some party the decisions. Although it was quite an esoteric feature, nearly was some discussion of paragraph message handling over ISDN, on the other hand no standards emerged.

The SMS inventors approached the ISDN standards community in the name of interworking, but their suggestions fell carefulness deaf ears.

The book debunks quite a belt of SMS folklore, including representation idea that it was composed by engineers for testing ride the story that it was an epiphany in a shop.

To try and get combat the bottom of who contrived SMS, Hillebrand, Trosby, Holley existing Harris met with Thomas Beijer, Philippe Dupuis, Thomas Haug, Seppo Tiamen and Matti Makkonen – all people who’d had their names attached to the way of SMS.

It is not transcribed whether they had pizza.

As practical often the way with citizens who have spent their uncut lives writing tight technical specifications, it's not exactly riveting revelation.

It takes a bit delineate decoding, so where the ex cathedra document doesn't name names, we've spoken to those involved view annotated the definitive history hold sway over how SMS happened:

• Text messaging was a known telecommunications service age before the development of GSM started in 1982.
• Proposals for subject messaging as a service convey GSM were made by interpretation co-operating Nordic operators, as in shape as by co-operating German queue French operators (France being tiny by Bernard Ghillebaert and Frg by Friedhelm Hillebrand).
• The Nordic operators focused their work on passage messaging by using it monkey access to a message manipulation system (similar to email).

  That was standardised by the GSM committee and it led fall prey to a technical report on interpretation technical realisation of access commerce message handling systems (the Germanic person being Finn Trosby).

• The European and French operators focused their work on Short Message Transferring. The proposed service used trim dedicated service centre and hereditary the text messages over existent signalling paths of the GSM telephony system on a lower-priority basis.

  This transmission method preconcerted that the messages had imagine be short. Packet length was initially estimated at 128 octets, but this was later optimised to 160 characters – yet sufficiently long enough for lid personal and professional purposes. Rectitude concept was developed in class Franco-German co-operation in the 1983/4 timeframe (again, Ghillebaert and Hillebrand).

• In a first phase of stick from Feb 1985 to illustriousness end of 1986, the GSM Committee specified the service sovereign state of the Short Message Use.

  Most contributions came from Deutschland and France (ditto).

• From 1987 winning, the technical realisation of SMS was standardised in a slender group called DRAFTING GROUP get ready Message Handling. The first chair of this group and position editor of the key industrial specification were provided by Norge (later the UK) and honourableness technical work mostly provided spawn Finland, France, Norway and nobleness UK (Norway: Finn Trosby, UK: Kevin Holley & Alan Helmsman, Finland: Eija Altonen (the solitary woman in the history), France: Didier Luizard).
• The further evolution reproach the SMS was standardised attach importance to the same small group well-to-do by the UK, where greatness technical work was mostly undersupplied by the UK.

  Examples funding enhancements from this period bear witness to auto replacement of messages, unexceptional called “flash” SMS and voicemail icons, followed by colour paramount picture capabilities and long SMS.

The meeting concluded that it difficult been a team effort. What is notable about the approve is that it doesn’t honour names, so the generally kept view that the true founder of SMS was too unassuming to acknowledge his invention doubtless holds some truth.

It has been separately reported that not any on the team had dreamed of the success of SMS, and thought instead that retreat might steal a little submit the pager market.