Gordon Matthews

Gordon Matthews (July 26, 1936 – February 23, 2002) was an American inventor and businessman and started one of the first companies which pioneered the commercialization of voicemail.

History Matthews was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After graduating from the University of Tulsa in 1959, with a bachelor's degree in engineering physics, Matthews joined the U.S. Marine Corps as an aviator.

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. 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.

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). Also, Delphi Communications of California first released their Delta 1 system in 1976, three years before the first patent filing by Matthews.

Legacy of VMX 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. 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.

Death In 2001, he became an executive of VTEL Corporation, a company based in Austin, Texas engaged in producing teleconferencing equipment. In 2002, VTEL renamed itself Forgent Networks.

Matthews was 65, and was survived by his wife, Monika, son Gordon, and only daughter, Christina.