dwatkins

Actually it was VMX not VMax.

Voice mail was the brainchild of Gordon Mathews, a successful entrepreneur who held 35 US and foreign patents at the time of his death on February 23, 2002.

In the late seventies Matthews began working on the technology that would eventually be called "voicemail." In 1979, Matthews took his technology and formed a company called VMX, which stands for Voice Message Express. He applied for a patent in 1979 to cover his voicemail invention and sold the first system to 3M. A few years later, in 1982 the patent for his invention was awarded. His "Voice Message Exchange" managed electronic messages in a digital format. (As a side note: Mathews' wife, Monika, recorded the first greeting on this first commercial voicemail.)

Matthews eventually left VMX in 1989. The company had hit rough financial waters and VMX was later sold to Octel Communications, which in turn was purchased by Lucent Technologies and spun off into a new company called Avaya. To this day, there are companies that still use VMX systems to meet their voice mail needs.