It all started in the year 1985. A year earlier, the SMS concept was developed by a German Engineer named Frieldhelm Hillebrand who works for GSM, but it was in this year, 1985 that the standard for a page of SMS was set.
Friedhelm Hillebrand did some experiments in that year to determine the length of the message. It was a general consensus that a message must be short but the standard length was yet to be ascertained.
Friedhelm Hillebrand was at his house that day and was typing out random sentences at home on his personal computer. When he was done, he counted every letter, punctuations and number typed out and realized they are always 160 characters or less, and that was how the limit was decided.
Because lots of persons though opposed to his choice, Frieldhelm did further tests to confirm the suitability of the number of characters he has chosen. He got some random postcards that people sent and realized they were less than 160 characters. The same also applied for telex sent by random persons. Thus he discovered people were already used to sending short messages and as such the 160 characters marks will be fitting.
Over the years, this standard has been adopted for use and that has also been a basis for Twitter’s 140 characters mark, with the remaining characters for the user’s address.
So that is why a page of the message is 160 characters. It’s a standard.
Do you have a long message you want to send through and want to keep it in the 160 characters mark? The use of acronyms can suffice.
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