Fact: the average post card contains less than 150 characters. That little nugget of information is partially why today’s text messages have a 160 character limit. For this, we have a nice German fellow to thank.
It’s true. The Los Angeles Times has a quick little interview with the man who can be considered the father of text messages. His name is Friedhelm Hillebrand, and he went about solving a problem in 1985. The problem, obviously: how to quickly page car phone-using craftsman while they’re out on the job. “Smith, woman you’re about to visit is a real hothead, be mindful.” (Really, that’s why text messages were invented: to page workers out in the field about late-breaking developments. Big change to, “Dude where u at? wanna get nice?”)
It just so happened that Hillebrand was chairman of Global System for Mobile Communications—GSM to you and I. So, after a little technical voodoo, including deciding to send text message data on a barely used radio channel, the text message was born.
And why 160 characters? Again, when Hillebrand discovered during his research that the average post card usually contained around 150 characters; people were already used to communicating using so few characters. (Telex messages were usually around this length, too, meaning that business users could easily adapt to text messages.) You’ll also find that your average e-mail today isn’t much longer than a text message. And, of course, then there’s Twitter, bane of our existence!
Photo: Flickr
well, thanks the info and nice picture…it’s only dutch your seeing at the picture and not german.
this is german: http://jetztimg.sueddeutsche.de/upl/images/user/mi/michele-loetzner/239686.jpg
and this too:
http://www.lidl.de/lidl/lidl_de/images/images_content/content_sms_erinnerung_small.jpg
greetings
They really shouldn’t limit message lengths these days. That, or at least give us more room. I HATE typing like a youtube commenter, its gross and annoying. Hell, give me even just two hundred and I’ll be a thousand times happier. Although I would really like to see something more around three hundred.
Here’s the real reason why we’re limited to a hundred and sixty measly characters that force us to talk like chimpanzee’s; Money. Wheres the benefit for them by increasing message length? Well, they could always advertise it to get people to prefer them over another brand.
My phone lets me fit about 1000 characters in a text and its two years old. It takes up more space than a single text message but it still shows it all in 1 piece on both phones so long as i dont send it to an old phone
Its not true. The reason why there is a 160 characters limit is that there was 140 bytes left in the message blocks in the GSM standard when GSM was designed. The designers chose to use it for messaging. Given that you only use 7 bit characters, that gives room for 160 characters with some nifty tweaking. If you use smileys or other non 7 bit characters, the amount of text you can use drops. The reason that you can write longer sms’es in reality is that there is a “chaining function” that links messages together. You can link 255 messages this way (allthough most phones limit at 10 or so) which gives a total usable length of some 40000 characters.
what language is the text on the picture? what does it say?
The languages are Dutch and Portuguese – it’s a translation of someone who I think is trying to say “I thought about you a lot today” except they have written the form of the verb for ‘he/she thought’ … unless this was intended. I can’t say because while I do speak Portuguese, I don’t speak Dutch. Wish I did though, I love the sound and look of Dutch words.