Gordon Matthews (inventor)

Matthews has said that the inspiration for his invention came in 1970, while visiting a client's office on business. He noticed a number of trash bins overflowing with message slips used by receptionists and secretaries to inform their bosses that someone tried to call him while he was in a meeting or otherwise unable to take the call himself. Very quickly, he developed a concept for an electronic system to store and receive messages. His first attempt, he said, "...required 64 telephone lines, 114 Intel 8086 microprocessors and four refrigerator-sized 200-megabyte hard drives." The hard part would be to find a company willing to buy an untested system.[1]

Matthews presented his concept at a conference attended by a Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) company executive named James Jensen, who immediately recognized the potential boom in executive productivity offered by the proposed system. By 1980, Jensen had persuaded his superiors to install the first system, which cost about $500,000 to serve about 3,000 users.[1]

In 1979, Gordon Matthews founded a company in Texas called ECS Communications. The first VMX system was engineered by John Cayton under the direction of Gordon Matthews. In 1979, Matthews also filed a method patent for voicemail, which was granted on February 1, 1983. Matthews patented what was called "Voice Message Exchange," U.S. Patent No. 4,371,752, and was a significant patent for voicemail. While there was prior art for voicemail, Matthews' patent was never adjudicated and held up until its expiration. Matthews eventually held over thirty-five patents, many of which related to voicemail.

Matthews later changed the name of his company to VMX Inc.[lower-alpha 1] He eventually developed a 3,000-user voice messaging system called the VMX/64. VMX was arguably the first company to offer voicemail for sale commercially for corporate use. Matthews was able to sell his system to several notable large corporations, such as 3M, Kodak, American Express, Intel, Hoffman La Roche, Corning Glass, ARCO, Shell Canada, Zenith Data Systems and Westinghouse. This impressive list of early adopters started the ball rolling on corporate voicemail.

While some claim that VMX and Gordon Matthews invented voicemail or that he was the "father of voicemail", this claim is not true. The first inventor of record was Stephen Boies of IBM in 1973, six years before Matthews filed his first patent. IBM released its first implementation of Speech Filing System (SFS) in 1975, four years before VMX was launched. SMS was later called Audio Distribution System (ADS).[3] Also, Delphi Communications of California first released their Delta 1 system in 1976, three years before the first patent filing by Matthews.

In general, executives loved the voice mail systems, however time revealed some downsides:

• While executive productivity may have improved, many secretarial and administrative jobs were eliminated;
• Paper notices about calls were eliminated, but VM did not necessarily improve call-backs by recipients;
• Information technology (IT) employees were needed to maintain the VM system.
• By 1990, articles in the popular press complained about, "..."voice mail jail" – being trapped in a labyrinthine series of telephone prompts that never seemed to lead to a human.[1]

In 1988, when VMX was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was acquired by Opcom, a designer and seller of computer software products for handling telephone calls.[4] Opcom was acquired in 1994 by Octel Communications, the largest provider of voice mail equipment and services in the world. In 1997, Octel was acquired by Lucent Technologies and spun off several years later as part of Avaya.