Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html

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.

Los Angeles Times article about the history of SMS text messaging

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. "This is perfectly sufficient," he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. "Perfectly sufficient." The communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to transmit and display text messages. Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the time -- which were mostly used for car phones -- each message would have to be as short as possible. Before his typewriter

aditya: Why 160 characters for an SMS? — http://tinyurl.com/cjwh7x

Quá! Eu sabia que tinha que ter um alemão entediado envolvido...

Top 50 Text Acronyms Parents Should Know 052009

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203674704574328920789548170.html?mod=yhoofront

In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.

this article is my initial article; laying out

A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.” A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. The decision could not have come from a dearth of business: the 2.5 trillion sent messages this year, the estimate of the Gartner Group, is up 32 percent from 2007. Gartner expects 3.3 trillion messages to be sent in 2009.

"text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted."

The public assumes that wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

nu stiu

«Today's high-school and college students got their first email account at an average age of 13. Most students have had one of their email addresses for 8 years and have an average of about 2.4 addresses each. But if you really want to reach these students, you should forget email. Send a text message instead.»

article about how students communicate with different technologies. For quest. 4 of hzau09.