Ever wondered why text messages are limited to 160 characters? Or why Twitter chose 140 characters as its limit? How about who came up with the standardized model for text messaging, ensuring all mobile phones could send and receive SMS? If so, read on.

Text messaging has been increasing in popularity for many years until now it actually exceeds the popularity of phone calls. Maybe that’s a bad thing for communication and the state of people’s thumbs but it’s no doubt a good thing for telephone companies who charge for each text sent.

Bizarrely, text messaging is one of those technologies most of us use on a daily basis yet none of us know how it came to be or who was involved. The Los Angeles Times recently spoke to Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German communications researcher who in 1985 was working with a dozen others in a brain trust tasked with standardizing text messaging for the emerging cellphone market.

SMS texts are limited to 160 characters, but why? This figure was arrived at by Hillebrand sitting at a typewriter punching out sentences and questions and then counting how many characters were being used. One-hundred-sixty seemed to be the magic number. The fact that postcards and Telex messages were also often made up of around 150 characters helped set the standard.

Twenty years later when Twitter was being created, the brains behind that new form of messaging service also had to ask themselves how many characters is fitting? Taking SMS as the model, they decided 140 characters would be sufficient, leaving 20 characters for the user’s address and enabling Twitter to utilize the system Hillebrand created all those years ago for a new purpose.

Text messaging was originally conceived as a paging system for people using mobile offices, but you would now be hard pushed to find someone who hasn’t sent at least one text in their lifetime. And they aren’t always used for good either, with bullying, being fired from a job, and splitting up with a partner all having become uses for SMS.

So, with the popularity and usefulness of texting now proven beyond all possible doubt, the man behind the method must be rich beyond his wildest dreams right? Wrong, as Hillebrand has never made a penny from his work on the system. Instead, he manages his technology patent consulting firm and has fun telling all and sundry that he is the person behind text messaging, by text presumably.

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Entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 2:50 am under Cell phones, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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