User talk:GSM-vet

Short Message Service
I was interested to see your reworking of part of this article and wondered what your background was. Don't worry, I am not criticising, it all looks fine to me and far better matches my understanding than what went before. I contributed the anecdote about the first short message because I was on the Sema Group team that developed Vodafone's first SMSC. I can't quite claim to have been there, but I was in a pub in Newbury on that day with senior Vodafon management to celebrate the event. SMeeds 22:55, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, at least I can tell you why I did involve myself in this article in the first place.

I know a little bit about some parts of the work on GSM at the late 80's, and was rather astonished when one year ago I saw that some editor of Wikipedia had pushed Matti Makkonen forward as "the father of SMS". That made me do some editing on the article to get things right. Matti is a nice fellow that contributed a lot to the NMT development, but he was attending very few GSM meetings - if anyone at all - and none that dealt with data services or SMS. I thought at first that some Finnish patriot had taken an initiative without Matti's knowing. That may also be the truth, but the Wikipedia version got to some major newspapers in the Nordic countries and shortly after Matti stood bluntly forward in several interviews as the father himself. The idea of SMS had - according to himself at the interviews - struck his mind after a lengthy NMT meeting in the early 80's, when he and some colleagues enjoyed a pizza and some beers and discussed the perspectives of NMT. "It should be possible to send text over the (digital) signalling channel of NMT" he said to his companions at that occasion, and then - still according to himself - the idea of SMS was born. No initiative of following up was taken, neither on that NMT meeting nor on any subsequent NMT meetings. Neither did any transfer of this idea to the embryo of the GSM initiative take place.

Well, as I said I corrected the article to make it 'parent neutral' and more according to reality, and forgot the whole thing. Until today, when I discovered that Matti once again was back on the stage with his fatherhood!

This strange and in some respect rather sad story is perhaps more about Wikipedia than it is on SMS. It is about the risks of replacing the professional editorial crew of any encyclopedia with the corresponding set of John Does. It works fine as long as the subject is rather neutral and the combined readers / editors allow themself to contribute on a rather objective and skillful way. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

GSM-vet 18:30, 19 October 2006 (UTC)