Ever wondered why SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters?
I'm not asking whether you care, just whether or not you've wondered.
I've read a few theories, and they are all fairly boring.
A popular possibility is that Freidhelm Hillebrand, a German communications researcher who conducted a personal study on the length of average sentences, figuring that even complex sentences tended to be shorter than 160 characters. He and his team set out to standardise the new medium of mobile phone communication, and as texts were not expected to be anything like as important and succesful as they have become, this fairly massive decision was taken quite easily.
I have also heard that GSM (the universal code that phones communicate with) texts are limited to 256 characters, but 96 of them are used up with the information of who has sent the message, who it is going to, and other background information. This leaves 160 characters for your message.
Another argument is something complicated to do with something called the Protocol Description United (PDU) and the Digitial Coding Scheme (DCS).
I'm not in a good position to tell you which is correct. I just read things, and write them. I'm a writer, after all, not a frickin' scientist.
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