The cornerstone of unity

87 SMS MESSAGING
Nowadays more than 3 billion GSM customers across the globe use SMS, Short Message Service, at work or just 
for fun. The most important features of the SMS are directness and speed, as well as the brevity of the message. 
Apart from being efficient, short messages are also polite they can be received without creating a disturbance and 
answered when appropriate. 
The idea of text messaging was born step by step. One ancestor of SMS is telex, which was still commonly 
used in the 1980s before e-mail and electronic phones arrived on the scene. Another root is the paging systems 
that were popular at the beginning of the 1980s. The beepers were able to receive text but the only way to send 
it was to dictate the text to an operator, who would then pass it on. It was clumsy to use and expensive for both 
the customer and the operator so the service never took off. 
The huge success of Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) inspired the Nordic telecommunications authorities to 
initiate a joint working group “FMK” in 1981 to develop future digital mobile communications. 
Engineers enthusiastically set out to develop radio technology that would be useful in everyday life, their 
ultimate goal being a multi-purpose pocket phone, which at the time was regarded by many as something of a 
joke. 
The first time that I realized that short text messages between mobile phones would be a useful device was in 
a brainstorming session with Juhani Tapiola and Seppo Tiainen in Copenhagen in the early 1980s when we met 
the evening before the Nordic project had sub-group meetings to prepare ourselves and discuss the feartures 
we hoped would become part of future mobile communications (FMK). 
Juhani Tapiola was mainly concerned with the difficulty of sending text messages to pagers, I was a firm 
believer in pocket phones, and Seppo Tiainen usually had a quick grasp of how an abstract idea could be 
concretely realised. First we concluded that the future system should enable messages to be dialed from pocket 
phones to pagers. Juhani Tapiola took a programmable HP calculator from his pocket to prove that the number 
of buttons needed to write messages with a small tool would not be a problem. Soon I realised that the whole 
paging system was unnecessary as the same mobile phone could also receive incoming messages. We 
excitedly made a list of different uses for text messages and invented a Finnish name for our system: 
“tekstinäpellin”. 
Of course, back then we never dreamt that in the space of 15 years text messages would be an everyday tool, 
not only for business but also for families and children everywhere around the world. 
At the same time as FMK was planning the first pieces of the modern mobile communication jigsaw, the same 
thing was also happening among many other national and international development teams. Text messages 
were also being considered in a Franco-German collaboration, and when European efforts were gradually 
moved into one organisation (Group Special Mobiles (GSM)) the Franco-German proposal for a text service 
(SMS) was worked into the final specification. 
The existence of SMS is based on the rapid development of enabling technologies, the free sharing of 
information, a huge joint effort to specify the new services and systems and the unselfish work of thousands of 
individuals. The international telecommunications field in the 1970s and early 80s regarded the free sharing of 
ideas as a virtue and an absolute requirement. 
As a social innovation, text messaging may be legitimately called Finnish. In the mid-1990s, when SMS was 
widely available for mobile phone users, Finland was the leading country in offering mobile services. In 

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Christmas 1996 the operators’ network collapsed under the weight of so many people sending their Christmas 
greetings by SMS, and the same thing happened later elsewhere. 
Matti Makkonen 
– pioneer in mobile services