from the say-it-in-160-characters-or-less dept.
BBC reports that Matti Makkonen, who helped to launch the worldwide sensation of texting, has died at the age of 63 after an illness.
Makkonen became known as the father of SMS after developing the idea of sending messages via mobile networks. Despite the nickname, he was often quick to point out that he did not invent the technology single-handedly.
In 2012, he told BBC News - in an SMS interview - that he believed texting in some form would be around "forever". Speaking on the 20th anniversary of the first text message, Makkonen said that he considered the development of SMS a joint effort and that it was Nokia who helped to popularise the service. "The real launch of the service, as I see it, was when Nokia introduced the first phone that enabled easy writing of messages (Nokia 2010 in 1994)," he said.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 01 2015, @01:48PM
he was often quick to point out that he did not invent the technology single-handedly.
This is what actual engineers who contribute to technological progress do. People who get rich on technological progress do the opposite: claim to be a genius inventor while building a PR machine to push that image everywhere, freely dismissing the labors of those who actually developed things. Edison, Jobs, Ford. They're names famous in the collective consciousness as inventors, but they mostly just paid engineers to do what engineers do.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:15PM
Absolutely! For an example of that, take Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson: Neither of them claimed to be the sole inventor of Unix, and if either one of them had chances are the other one would likely have been pissed off enough that they stopped working together.
The reason engineers have a tough time of things in business is that they're typically the only people in most organizations that are not professional liars [dilbert.com].
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @03:36PM
I invented a really excellent mousetrap.
The prototype has been sitting in my box in my garage for the last ten years.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RobotMonster on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:03PM
I'm not up on the latest standards, but back on original GSM -- SMS messages were taking advantage of unused bytes in existing packets. This is where the size limit came from. They also had no guarantee of delivery.
That's why your mobile provider loved to charge you per SMS sent (or to seem generous by offering free SMS) - no actual cost to them...
If you've ever had the misfortune to need to read or understand the original GSM specifications, you have my condolences. The specs were clearly written to describe a pile of spaghetti that had been cobbled together by engineers trying to get *something* going.
Even on 4G I still occasionally get bizarrely corrupted calls -- I can only imagine that the current specifications have been piled on top of the old GSM madness...
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:27PM
The 4g corruption almost certainly has to do with the whole digitization->compression->loss->decompression->analog chain.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:49PM
Nah -- I'm talking corruption where you get to hear yourself, corrupted to buggery, or just complete call failure, or various other things that just shouldn't happen, ever, in a digital system.
My favourite detail from the GSM specs was "comfort noise" -- this is where your phone generates white-noise to play to you when there aren't any packets coming through, to help convince you that your phone is still working...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:59PM
It's not to convince you your phone is still working, but to convince you that the connection is not dead. You won't consciously notice that noise, but you will notice its absence (assuming you're not in a noisy surrounding, of course).
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday July 01 2015, @03:09PM
Well yeah, that's what I meant. Full points for pedantry! :-)
(Score: 2) by Anne Nonymous on Wednesday July 01 2015, @03:47PM
FPOTTD = Finnish Pioneer of Texting Tech Dies
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2015, @12:23PM
srsly 2 bad