Why text messages are limited to 160 characters - Los Angeles Times

mikehudack:

justinday:

rocketboom:

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

Source: rocketboom

164 Notes/ Hide

  1. keanan reblogged this from rocketboom and added:
    The more you know:
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  5. rise-or-die reblogged this from rocketboom and added:
    Interesting reasoning behind...important numbers in our lives.
  6. badforuimback reblogged this from rocketboom
  7. tropical-indy reblogged this from isitdank and added:
    its not efficient at all those bastards at the cell phone company can suck it cause they been sucking my wallet dry for...
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