Nokia History : Telecommunications Era

The seeds of the current incarnation of Nokia were planted with the founding of the electronics section of the cable division in the 1960s. In the 1967 fusion, that section was separated into its own division, and began manufacturing telecommunications equipment.

Since 1964 had developed VHF-radio simultaneously with Salora Oy, which later in 1971 also developed the ARP-phone. In 1979 the merger of these two companies resulted in the establishment of Mobira Oy and three years later it launched the NMT phone. Nokia bought Salora Oy in 1984 and now owning 100% of the company, changed the company's name to Nokia-Mobira Oy. In 1988, Jorma Nieminen, resigning from the post of CEO of the mobile phone unit, along with two other employees from the unit, started a notable mobile phone company of their own, Benefon Oy. One year later, Nokia Mobira Oy became Nokia Mobile Phones and in 1991 the first GSM phone was launched.

In the 1970s, Nokia became more involved in the telecommunications industry by developing the Nokia DX200, a digital switch for telephone exchanges. In 1982, a DX200 switch became the world's first digital telephone switch to be put into operational use. The DX200 became the workhorse of the network equipment division. Its modular and flexible architecture enabled it to be developed into various switching products.

For a while in the 1970s, Nokia's network equipment production was separated into Telefenno, a company jointly owned by the parent corporation and by a company owned by the Finnish state. In 1987 the state sold its shares to Nokia and in 1992 the name was changed to Nokia Telecommunications.

In the 1970s and 1980s Nokia developed the Sanomalaitejärjestelmä ("Message device system") for Finnish Defence Forces. [10]

In the 1980s, Nokia produced a series of personal computers called MikroMikko.[11] However, the PC division was sold to ICL, which later became part of Fujitsu. That company later transferred its personal computer operations to Fujitsu Siemens Computers, which shut down its only factory in Finland (in the town of Espoo, where computers had been produced since the 1960s) at the end of March 2000[12], thus ending large-scale PC manufacturing in the country.