I remember sending my first sms/text message way back in the beginning of 2000 well actually I first received a message. You see there was this girl… all stories seem to start this way! Anyway she had told me about it but I was unsure as back then phones weren’t quite geared towards SMS’ing peeps.

Anyway again back to this girl I was minding my time at a shopping center when my phone made a noise at first as you did in the beginning I didn’t realise it was my phone or thought it was something near by. Eventually when no-one else did anything I thought maybe me phone was dying or the alarm was going off so I brought out the brick. And there waiting for me was my first sms from this girl wanting to know if i wanted to go out for drinks or something.

At first I was quite intrigued by this SMS and a bit worried that she could get hold of me so easily and personally so I did the best thing and ignored it only to find her later that day with bit of a chip on her shoulder for not replying. And from that day on I was caught by the little 160character message you could send to your friends, come the first Christmas and BAM I was there trying to SMS all 100 of my friends only to get ‘Network busy try again later’

So back to the main story of why its limited to 160 characters and amazingly enough some guy, Friedhelm Hillebrand, back in 1985 say typing on his type writer trying to work out what the average length for a short message. He’d type something out with punctuations and numbers etc and then count out each character.

He came out with 160 characters as the average and declared that “This is perfectly sufficient”, as he was the chairman for the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) which is a group that sets standards for the majority of the global market he pushed his plan ahead and in 1986 it became the standard for mobile phones.

You can read more about it here.

I can’t believe that all of this was done while I was still 5 years old… and he doesn’t even get a couple of cents from each SMS sent!