Why SMS can not be more than 160 characters

I always thought that the size of one sms was limited to 160 characters, because there were some technical limitations until the 1970s. But actually, it’s because some German researcher thought that 160 characters was “absolutely sufficient.”



Friedham Hillebrand was a message researcher who worked with the mobile phone standard development team for sending and receiving text messages. He just sat down at his typewriter and got some luscious sentences and questions, counted the number of characters that came out, and decided that 160 would be enough.



In any case, as the chairman of the GSM services in the committee, he came up with the idea of ​​“loopholes” (by cutting back some characters) of messages in the already used radio channels of the phone, which were initially limited to 128 characters, and not 160 as Hillebrand decided. After several settings, they raised the limit to 160 characters. Then they forced each operator to support short text messages (SMS). Friedham Hillebrand, hero of our time.



via Los Angeles Times .