I remember telling my study mates that I’d got a job at Nokia. Their first question was: “When are you moving?” Nokia was a conglomerate back then, with half of its revenue coming from Finland and the other half from abroad. The company was known mostly for toilet paper, boots and tyres. They were produced in the town of Nokia.

Kari Kairamo, who was the company’s CEO at the time, saw the value of communications and understood that Nokia, then small and little-known, could improve its status in the international market with the help of communications, hence the investment in this area. So I got the chance to learn about communications at a company with the will and possibilities to pursue it in an ambitious and goal-directed way.

We used word-processors in the communications department at that time; fax was only just becoming more common and stock market bulletins had to be sent via telex. You could see the results of your work in the newspaper the next day or on FBC’s evening news. With the introduction of Nokia’s MikroMikkos, PCs became more common and the company’s internal e-mail, “smail,” turned our world upside down. The first mobile phone – hugely expensive – was launched in the autumn of 1986. You still couldn’t send text messages on it though.

When I think back to the beginning of my career, I feel like a dinosaur – that’s how radical the changes in communication technology have been.