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' involvement in trying to mesh human voices to technology was many years in the making. A fellow friend and pilot perished in a mid-air collision, which Matthews believed was caused when he momentarily took his eyes off of his plane's controls to adjust his radio frequency. After he was discharged from the military, Matthews went to work for IBM to help develop voice-activated cockpit controls which would help lessen similar types of catastrophic errors in the future. After IBM, Matthews went to work for Texas Instruments in 1966. Inspiration and first commercial system 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. 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. Founding of VMX 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