Why text messages have 160-character limits

Ever wonder why most text messages can only be 160 characters long? It has less to do with technological restraints, and more to do with very unscientific research done by Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German researcher, in 1985. “Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, [Hillebrand] sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper,” Mark Milian explained in the Los Angeles Times . “As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numb…

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