It used to be rude to not look people in the eye or read at the dinner table, now it seems everybody is texting the split second every day conversation gets too boring. Texting has become the popular way to reach everybody, and now the man who invented it has died.
Now Uproxx and Wired tell us the man who invented text messaging, Matti Makkonen, has passed away at the age of 63. Makkonen reportedly came up with the idea in 1984, and he didn’t patent the idea, which means he never made any money off it. (He also refused to take sole credit for this, saying it was a joint effort with his fellow engineers.)
Makkonen came up with the idea during a telecom conference, and Uproxx tells us that even though eh didn’t make any money off his innovation, he was still a major executive for a number of telecom companies.
It’s remarkable how these days texting has outshadowed practically every other way of communicating, to the point where we wonder if people will stop making phone calls in the near future. As Makkonen told the BBC, “I believe that reliable convenient to use text messaging will stay forever.”
