Y r txt mssgs so shrt? Nt wht u think

The only people who don't know about text messages these days are 90-year-olds and infants. Even if you don't use the feature, it is available on nearly every phone in use. Recently, text messaging overtook voice use on cell phones for the first time, indicating that texting is here to stay. Even with email-capable devices, text messaging has retained its popularity despite a 160-character limit. While you might think this limit is in place to force subscribers to send more messages, making more money for telecoms, it can actually be traced back to a typewriter in Germany, circa 1985.

That's when Hildebrand, the father of text messaging, was working on a new way to send text messages to phones. Limited by the bandwidth and clunky entry systems, his team set out to find the correct number of characters for a text message. After determining that most comments and questions were fewer than 160 characters, they chose it as their text message length, and thus set the standard for text messages, known as SMS, or short message service.