History of the creation of 160 characters in SMS

Mobile phone users would know, if a message in the SMS consists of 160 characters.However, not many people know the history, how the initial creation of a 160-character limit on SMS.

Many theories have mentioned the 160-character limit. However, the most common theory is known to limit 160 characters were created by developers from Deutsche Telekom telecommunications Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand.


As quoted from the blog Los Angeles Times, on a night in 1985, Hillebrand sat at his home in Bonn room as he continued talking by asking a number of statements and questions. Currently, the spokesman ketiknya prompted to type every word uttered by Hillebrand.


Finished talking, Hillebrand and counting letters, numbers, letters pause, punctuation, and spaces available on each page. Apparently, when Hillebrand discovered that, almost every babble that consists of one or two lines consisting of nearly 160 characters.


"It's very appropriate," said Hillebrand, who was then aged 45 years.


At that time, telecommunications experts is being developed to make the existence of a technology standard that allows mobile phones to transmit and display text messages.


The idea of ​​160 characters and then precipitated by Hillebrand and colleagues, Bernard Ghillebaert of France Telecom, the GSM developers group meeting in 1985. The idea of ​​two men were later to be developed further and became the standard number of characters in an SMS.


Before you start a character that, Hillebrand himself had argued with one of his friends about the benefits of text messaging in communications. "My friend said it may not be used in bulk, but I'm optimistic," said Hillebrand.


Hillebrand optimism proved. Maybe, this time via SMS text messaging is more widely used than the telephone. Hillebrand also never thought that his findings are now widely used around the world young people to decide his girlfriend.


However, Hillebrand no financial gain from the work they create. Because there are no royalties in the creation of sms. If in each SMS Hillbrand earn money, he thought, "That certainly would be nice," Hillebrand said.


However, 160 characters is created is then increasingly popular Hillebrand. Its popularity became more so thanks to a young man named Jack Dorsey who created the social network called Twitter.


Twitter then adapt the work of this Hillebrand to 140 characters for each tweet. Jack Dorsey seems to understand the 'services' Hillebrand. In a tweet, Jack Dorsey posted a link on the history of SMS which is a service of Hillebrand. In a tweet that there's a link about the history of SMS, Hillebrand creation Dorsey acknowledged the influence of the limitation of 140 characters on Twitter.


"Why text messages are limited to 160 characters (which influenced Twitter's 140)," Dorsey wrote in his tweet.