Comments on: Why Text Messages Are Only 160 Characters

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:02:50 +0000

I don’t think this article answers the question: “why are text’s limited to 160 characters NOW” Just because someone in 1985 decided 160 was enough! Also if no one wants or needs to do more, why limit it to 160 ? Why not 200 or 400…most people wouldn’t use it. Also, text takes very little bandwidth to transmit

By: Kent

Kent — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:40:00 +0000

Having sent some, may I suggest that Telex messages were short for two reasons: they were expensive to send and, more importantly, they were a pain in the fingers to compose. A Telex keyboard is, to put it mildly, clunky.

Perhaps related to this, though, are the limitations of the ASCII character set. “The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (usually abbreviated ASCII) was introduced in 1963 and is a 7-bit encoding scheme used to encode letters, numerals, symbols, and device control codes as fixed-length codes using integers). IBM’s Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (usually abbreviated EBCDIC) is an 8-bit encoding scheme developed in 1963.” quoted from Wikipedia, but the point is that the IBM product was better. Better does not mean it will be adopted, of course!

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:47:00 +0000

… to complete my thought. This is why I love mentalfloss.

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:46:00 +0000

what a great post! I’ve always wondered this. This is why I