Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters

We're all familiar with Twitter, a social networking service that enables its users to send text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Why only 140 characters? Because of Friedhelm Hillebrand.

In 1985, 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.