Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters

The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. "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 ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Comments

I'll Be Damned

[eldavojohn]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, it was the largest number that Hillebrand could count to in his mind before losing track.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[JeffSpudrinski]

The few times I've tried messaging from my cell phone, my thumbs cramp after about 50 characters, so the "limitation" never affects me.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Red Flayer]

tl;dr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[bunratty]

I guess you had something interesting to say on that second line, but I lost interest at the end of the first.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone us...

I totally lost interest past that.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Midnight Thunder]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone u".

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

You might want to make two posts next time. Character count with space = 208.

Don't start me. I know any number of supposedly intelligent people who are apparently incapable of reading a simple email containing a series of questions or points.

They will respond to the first question, but anything after that is consigned to /dev/null. I occasionally get cranky about it and send off a series of single-sentence emails, with the query in the sentence line.

I don't know whether it's my circle of acquaintances, but the worst offenders seem to be MBAs. (Maybe it really does mean Master of Bugger-All). Or maybe it's just the Simpsonisation of society that gives it the attention span of a flea.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[omnichad]

I don't get your point. All I read was "I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was t"

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nlawalker]

This may be my number one pet peeve when it comes to professional communication. I have tried a number of ways of getting multiple questions to register, but nothing seems to be perfectly effective. The best tactic I've managed to come up with is including only the following in the body of an email:

1. A preamble, no longer than two sentences, that says something along the lines of "[Person's name here], I need your response to the following questions by [date]:". Using their name is key, even if no one else is on the To: or CC: line.
2. A *numbered* list of questions (not bulleted), each ending in a question mark.

The other thing I've started doing is keeping a running list called "waiting on" that serves the sole purpose of listing the responses and tasks I'm waiting on from other people, no matter how small. As a consultant, I've found that "due diligence" means "one reminder email at least every other work day" when it comes to getting questions answered. Otherwise, getting chewed out for not adequately following up is a very real possibility. I've been asked for a paper trail before, and I always get a laugh of approval when I spool out the reams of email I've sent trying to get the simplest questions answered.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[jcr]

the worst offenders seem to be MBAs

MBAs from what schools?

I've found a tremendous range in quality among MBAs, with Harvard MBAs being just about useless, and Stanford MBAs generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

-jcr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Bemopolis]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[bennomatic]

You're totally right.

• people respond somewhat well to bullet lists
• people respond somewhat well to numbered lists
• give people a paragraph or two and they will either ignore it, or worse, call you.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

Harvard has a bad rep for its MBA degrees. That doesn't AFAIK apply to its "real" degrees.

(I'll probably attract flames for that quoted word, so let's just say that's my prejudice and leave it at that.)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[MrMarket]

Have you tried picking up the phone. You can always send your e-mail (but with the answers) as a paper trail of your conversation.

It provides two benefits:

1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from. This is really important with gatekeepers.

2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.

If you don't get them, don't leave a vm. Just send your e-mail and call them later.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[FatdogHaiku]

If you make it into a MySpace style survey (mix in questions about favorite color and second letter of last name, etc.), not only will they answer you, they will forward it to everyone they know... and most of those people will also reply.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nomorecwrd]

Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.

This is a broadly known fact.

Years ago, here in Chile anyway, SMS where free of charge.
Now is pure profit. (about 8ct/SMS at current exchange)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mister Whirly]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?

His dad pulled some serious strings?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[SpaceLifeForm]

The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy.

It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hatta]

1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from.

It's also amazing how annoying your idle chatter can be to a busy person who is trying to do things for you. Email is asynchronous, so the busy person can attend to it when they have time. A phone call is always an interruption.

2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.

In my experience, those most likely to use the phone are also the most likely to prattle on and on about completely irrelevant topics.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Thinboy00]

I guess you had something interesting to say after that comma,

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

I've found a tremendous range in quality among Standford MBAs, with 1969's being just about useless, and 1968's generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

Is that 1968s from North facing rooms or South? I tend to find the latter are a little less full bodied, though the former sometimes have a slihtly musty nose to them, almost as if they're corked.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Urkki]

Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.

This is a broadly known fact.

Just like the "real" cost of a phone call is also practically zero for the operator, as the extra electricity used for one call is basically nothing. So every call charged by minute is pure profit for the operator.

Which is (partly) why there are packages with a lot of free minutes and messages. At least in Finland, for around 50 eur / month you can even have unlimited audio and video calls, unlimited SMS and MMS messages and unlimited 3G data.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

>>>The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy. It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.

I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good. You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).

The flip-side of this is that money collected from all these texters helps subsidize my (and your) voice calls. I pay just 18 cents a minute, which is a real bargain considering wired phone calls in 1990 used to be 25 cents a minute. Simple inflation says the price should have increased to 45 cents, but instead prices have dropped and with the added benefit of being wireless. Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.

Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.

With today's private companies I can choose to buy or not buy, text or not text, make calls or not make calls. I control my own destiny and how much I want to spend (or not spend).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Toonol]

Ok, added you to my friends list. It's depressingly rare that I see a Slashdotter that understands even the most basic concepts of capitalism.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good.

I think you mean Adam Smith, and I think you're misreading the GP. Cost != price. The retail price is whatever the market will bear, but the cost of providing SMS service is virtually zero.

You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).

It's awfully glib to say we shouldn't be upset about being ripped off just because we have a choice. In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost. That obviously isn't happening with SMS: customers would like to pay less, but no one is offering SMS for less, even though it costs almost nothing to provide. Doesn't that suggest a market failure?

Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.

Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors. The USPS will carry a physical envelope from my doorstep to someone else's doorstep, thousands of miles away, for less than the price of 3 text messages.

(I'm not saying we should nationalize cellular companies - just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying.)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Rob the Bold]

The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith

Adam Smith?

Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.

Wouldn't the voice calls also cost whatever the market would bear, as you assert for text messages, and if not, why is this a special case?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).

That's impressive. Who's your cell phone provider and what sort of package do you need to get that deal? The carriers I know of charge 15 to 20 cents per message (although you can get a discount on the first N messages with a package).

That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post).

No, that's completely false. If someone told you that, they were lying.

"The Postal Service is a self-sufficient agency. The cost of postal operations, including the costs to extend service to an additional 1.2 million new deliveries in 2008, must be financed by the revenue generated from the sale of postal products and services." (link)

And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.

And when you need to send a letter, return a warranty card, pay a bill... do you use FedEx or UPS? I sure hope not: it'd cost much, much more and probably be less reliable. Sending packages is one thing, but private companies simply cannot provide the same service as the USPS for regular mail.

I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.

That's because you're deliberately ignoring the prime example.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[[Zappo]]

I've written application software for telco/carrier back ends, that's been deployed at carriers on every continent.

My layer sat on top of the infrastructure layer for SMS, but here's my best recollection from the internal training I got years ago.

Just like the article said, SMS was carried over the control path for call setup/takedown.

That path had very low bandwidth compared to the data (voice data, not IP data) path for calls. It was a control path and didn't need much. It was a limited resource with dedicated protocols and channels. Particularly in the early days of SMS, voice data was THE source of revenue for cell phones.

So using up the bandwidth in the control channel meant not being able to connect calls. There was a shortage of a precious resource whose over-use could strangle the primary flow of revenue to the carrier. So while the message itself was not expensive per se, it definitely was not without cost to the carrier. Carriers wanted to start exploring non-voice data services, and this gave them a way to get started without changing their existing network protocols and data flow, but they definitely had to be careful about how it was deployed and priced.

Of course telco pricing for ANYTHING is such a complicated market-driven competitive mess that there is an entire sub-industry of companies who keep track of all the special offers, plans, promotions, and whatnot that a given company has issued, knows which of its customers are in which plan, analyzes all the customer activity, and figures out who should be billed for what and how much. You're crazy if you think you can work out a "fair" price for a single element of telco service based on a guess of what it costs the telco to provide it.

At any rate, over time the carriers built up infrastructure around SMS, added IP gateways for the data that went over those dedicated control channels, added to their control channel capacity, etc., etc. Plus, in the US at least, SMS became and remained one of the most popular and steady data services among mobile users. All the major carriers in the US face significant business problems right now, and if they've got a small bright spot with predictable revenue at decent margins for a service folks like to use -- well, you can bet they're happy to have it and will charge what the market will bear (one way or another, in one plan or another, etc., etc.).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

I have Verizon and pay $4/month for 400 txt messages...

That's $0.01/message.

Correction: that's $0.01 per message if you use exactly 400.

If you only use one, it's $4 per message.

And if you use more than 400, you pay an extra 20 cents for the 401st message (and each message after that).

Why is there no option to pay a reasonable per-message fee without having to commit to buy more messages than you actually use?

no, its because 160

[circletimessquare]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 16*10

all of us techies straddle these two worlds. 160 is our numerology of frustration, the techie 666

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

it also happens to be precisely 2 lines of text on a good old 80 character wide terminal.

Re:no, its because 160

[SgtPepperKSU]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10

fixed that for you

Are you joking?
0x10*10...

Re:no, its because 160

[jellomizer]

80 characters (bytes) just happened to be how many punched you can normally fit on a standard punch card.

Re:no, its because 160

[wastedlife]

The number of characters that can be printed across CowboyNeal's buttocks. He has a very long yet narrow ass that contains a tattoo of every sig in slashdot.

Re:no, its because 160

[The Evil Couch]

That means that 160 characters makes perfect sense! You'd get 160 characters if you used both sides of the punch card!

Re:no, its because 160

[pwfffff]

Why bother to sub a 1 for the I if you're just going to go nuts with an L at the end?!

Re:no, its because 160

[waddleman]

It's a long fail.

Why text messages instead of email?

[loshwomp]

The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?" All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere. 160-character limit? That is *so* 1990s.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ironicsky]

Thats because the majority of Internet Providers restrict their users from sending email from relaying off network to their network. These same providers refuse to enable authenticated SMTP to fix the problem of open relays.

Luckily my cell phone provider, Rogers, in Canada has a mobile SMTP server accessable from the cellular network only specifically for the purpose of relaying SMTP from mail accounts configured on smart phones.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Krneki]

Because you can charge for SMS, while emails needs full Internet access. And they don't want to give us cheap Internet access.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Sockatume]

The account's set up with your phone number, uses the same user identifier, travels with the phone number, and there's a billing infrastructure for it. Meanwhile the vast majority of phone users don't even have packet data plans. It's operator inertia, basically.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[drsquare]

Because phone Internet access is incredibly expensive compared to text messages. Japan isn't a good example, they love any expensive gimmick.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Speare]

I think the Japanese and Chinese markets have completely ignored the SMS thing because of the character sets involved. If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty? That's probably enough for some thoughts like "Meet you at train station at 11am" but nothing really more complicated than that.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[FredFredrickson]

I laughed a little when I read your comment. Stupid USA, no internet on their cell phones! Get with the times.

It occured to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.

Interestingly, quite a few companies all have a vested interest in keeping society from progress. I mean, just a few articles back, we had an example of the newspaper industry just not getting it. My gut feeling? Wouldn't it make sense, instead of a billion different newsbook-readers, each for it's own brand of newspaper, just let me get my news on the cell phone?

And suddenly I see the problem- we don't have internet on our phones because NOBODY wants us to have the access that snuck up on US companies.

Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off. Instead of investing in it then, or learning from their mistakes, they're not investing in it now. So we still have companies fighting the internet. Even the internet companies are fighting us having internet.

Too late though, cat's out of the bag, and once you've seen it, you can never go back. I will never settle for a dumbed-down version of the internet, and going back to buying CDs (I buy mp3s) and purchasing cable (I watch hulu, and rent netflix).

Once we ALL have email on our internet enabled phones, we won't be able to be charged for each txt message. The internet is a pipeline, we can use email, IM, twitter, or whatever we please to communicate. This will be the undoing of the txt addons in the same way internet TV has/will ruin subscription cable.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[XxtraLarGe]

"Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?"

I can't speak for everybody, but I use a Tracfone. Talking costs $.10 a minute, but text messages only cost me $.03 per message. I pay $6 per month for my phone (it's mostly for emergencies), and communicating by text message helps to spread out the amount of use I can get each month. One thing that's even better is the fact that my wife or I can text each other from our e-mail. It's easier if I'm at the store and my wife texts me to pick up eggs, milk, what-have-you, so I'll only use $.03 to get the same message I would have had to stop and answer the phone for $.10.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Lumpy]

Because the packet data plans are insanely overpriced!

In the usa it's all about raping the consumer.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[julesh]

If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty?

Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything. A clever encoding scheme might squeeze as many as 80 in. OTOH, each of those characters carries more information than a single character of English text. Not sure about Japanese, but most common Chinese words are only two characters long, so being able to include fewer characters shouldn't be a real issue.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Aladrin]

128, at least, assuming UTF8. And the Japanese can say things a lot more compactly than we can:

èããY - I woke up.
åå¾OEãé£Yãã¾ã--ãY - I ate in the afternoon.
éf½éYã®åé"ãé話ã'ã--ã¾ã(TM) - I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo.

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[vigour]

Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off.

Who are you? Dubya?.

Well, there's always the test

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[TheRaven64]

Kanji is much denser than English text. You need a minimum of 4 characters plus a space per word in English (the average is closer to 5-6, meaning 7 bytes - 5.25 octets with a 6-bit byte). In contrast, a lot of common words in Chinese or Japanese need only one or two ideographs. These can all be represented in a 16-bit character set, and probably closer to 14 bits. This means that the 1024-bit header for SMS can carry something like 70 words in Japanese or Chinese, but only about 25 in English.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can handle it.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[jabithew]

This is reminding me of Shannon Entropy. I'm guessing human thought contains a similar amount of bits whether it's expressed in Chinese (high bits/character) or French (low bits per character).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ChrisMaple]

To shorten your English samples:
I woke up. -> I woke.
I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.
I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo. -> I'm phoning my Tokyo pal.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Jerry Smith]

I don't know about that, just earlier today I was reading a post from a slashdotter from Norway that said cellphone modem connections don't count as broadband by some technical definition yet the Verizon Rev A, AT&T 3G and Sprint 3G (not to mention their pilot 4G) network all fit his definition. Cost is still high, especially when you consider the low 5GB caps but with a modern smart phone the US networks are plenty advanced. Personally I love an OS 4.5 Blackberry and Safari on the iPhone 3G is very cool for pages that Opera mini doesn't parse well.

Broadband is on one hand defined as a multiplex connexion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier T1 for instance, on the other the FCC defines it as a >200 kbit connection (either up or down). OT, but hopefully informative.

(NOT posting as AC, and proud of it)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[zindorsky]

Worth noting:

UTF-16 is much better than UTF-8 for encoding asian scripts. UTF-8 needs 3 bytes per code point in that range, while UTF-16 needs only two.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[David_W]

I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.

Verbing weirds language.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[SlashDotDotDot]

'To lunch' has been a legitimate verb far longer than people have been, *ahem*, texting.

SMS vs email

[pieterh]

An exercise in cartel economics: compare the costs of SMS traffic vs. email traffic and explain the differences. :-)

Re:SMS vs email

[Rob Kaper]

Differences:

- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

- SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

- SMS is cheaper: most plans offer a sufficient amount of free messages a month for most users, e-mail requires an additional GPRS data plan

YMMV but SMS is not as bad as some people claim.

Re:SMS vs email

[Dan East]

Here's what's ridiculous. I have a Blackberry, and do not have an SMS plan with my carrier, thus each text costs me 25 cents to send. Receiving SMS is free and unlimited. I have an unlimited data plan for Blackberry, so I simply send emails using the carrier email SMS gateways for "free". The only downside is that the recipient cannot directly reply to my message. Here's the stupid part. The amount of bandwidth, processing, and inter-service gateways my emails have to pass through must require at least 100 times the resources of sending an actual SMS. The final kicker is that even if I keep my actual message under 160 chars, they are usually broken up into more than one SMS message because of the header attached by the SMS gateway that contains my email address, etc.

Re:SMS vs email

[CodingHero]

As mentioned in the article summary above, SMS also uses a channel that isn't used for much else other than miscellaneous call and signal strength data. It is also my impression that text messages have no guaranteed timeframe for delivery, as said miscellaneous data takes precedence. So it seems to me that since SMS takes advantage of facilities that would still exist in its absence, charging $0.20 per message (or even anything at all) is akin to a ripoff. See also: http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages/

Re:SMS vs email

[LordLimecat]

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

wouldnt the sender of spam have an unlimited texting account or use some email-to-text service?

Re:SMS vs email

[smallfries]

Well.... I haven't seen a 160 character limit in Europe for years because *every* handset automatically splits/reassembles arbitrary length messages. And the cost hasn't been a factor as I haven't seen a call-plan that charges for text messages in years either...

Re:SMS vs email

[drinkypoo]

Two words in response: Watermelon rutabaga.

My response is only slightly more inscrutable than yours. Care to explain how one or two packets being worth more than thousands of packets can be explained by the fact that all the data has to be carried by towers? Text messagers should be encouraged. You just ratchet up the base rate, and give away text messaging. That way you save money when people text, and they thank you for it. Then they do more texting, and you can use less-performant towers because you're carrying less data. The cellphone providers have driven people to use as many minutes as possible and then they want to charge us for it, which is why more and more people are looking for alternate phone services. The only reason we don't have THOSE is due to government collusion (there is no fucking way all these AT&T mergers should ever have been approved — why did we ever split up Ma Bell in the first place?)

Re:SMS vs email

[Just Some Guy]

SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

Translation: phone providers suck for not broadly offering decent services.

SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

And a Prius is faster than a Ferrari because it doesn't have those big, heavy brakes.

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

Translation: it's not a bug, it's a feature!

SMS is cheaper

ROTFLMAOWTFBBQ!1!

Assuming you're serious, data plans here start at $30/month for browsing + messaging + whatever else you can send over a socket. Unlimited texting is $20, or you can pay $0.25 as you go. Send 3 text messages a day and it's cheaper just to buy the best plan.

No need for more

[XPeter]

bc whn u txt u typ lik ths so ther isnt any ned fr mor thn 160 chars. I'm a teen, I know best.

biocompression

[micromuncher]

My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter is already using what looks like huffman coding in her text messages... why doesn't some genius study that.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

You should definitely hit that in a year or so.

Bad article

[Sockatume]

The article states outright that the 160-character limit came before Hillebrand's "typewriter experiment", and that the experiment actually about because of an argument between Hillebrand and a coworker about whether 160 characters was sufficient for a sensible message. This meshes with what we already know about SMS, namely that it could never have been much more than 128 characters for technical reasons. Quite why the article structures its opening to suggest that Hillebrand pulled the number out of his arse after some typewriter time is a mystery.

Getting 160 chars in 128 bits.

[pavon]

For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn't. The increased the length of the frame to 140 bytes, which is is 160 characters using a 7 bits/char. Curiosity forced me to look this up, expecting to find some snazzy compacting algorithm for a non power-of-two alphabet.

Re:Getting 160 chars in 128 bits.

[evanbd]

There are some straightforward compaction algorithms for non power-of-two sizes. The simplest approach is to take n symbols in your alphabet, treat it as an n-digit number base b (the number of different symbols), and convert that to base two. You'll use at most ceiling(n * log2(b)) bits.

You can be more sophisticated by using a compression algorithm of some sort (Huffman with a standardized dictionary, for a simple example). Anything that does better than the above n * log2(b) will produce a variable length output, though, which means that while you could usually fit more than 160 characters into 140 bytes, sometimes the limit would be lower (since rare characters take more bits to encode).

text messages longer than160 characters

[viralMeme]

How about tokenizing commonly used words and sending that, ne byte per word ?

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[tirerim]

Because you only get 256 different words that way? There are a lot more commonly used words than that, and then you're left with no way to spell out the uncommonly used words, either. You could use two bytes per word... but that's basically what txtspk is anyway, only with variable compression, such that the most common words get compressed down to a single byte (often as part of a longer abbreviation).

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Sockatume]

I think that 256 words should be enough for everyone. It's not like ???INEXPRESSABLE CONCEPT ERROR????

BINGO!

[wonkavader]

And a full-screen terminal (3270, etc.) is really just 25 punch cards. You press "Enter" and they get submitted. Your batch processes and the system returns you 25 punch cards which your smart 3270 punch card reader/editor displays for you.

Punch cards are based on the civil-war-era dollar bill because there were already machine to count and stack dollar bills.

Punch cards were IBM's most profitable product ever until the introduction of the IBM PC.

Re:BINGO!

[OlRickDawson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card Punch cards predate the computer, because they were used in loom machines to generate paterns. The punch cards were later used for statistical purposes. IBM was already selling statistical machines that used the punch cards before the computer. The reason that IBM was able to grab the market instead of Univac, is because IBM's computers was compatible with the punch cards that the corporations already had.

Re:BINGO!

[plover]

I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card

You could print shadowed boxes that look like punched holes, that way if someone puts them on a photocopier or in a fax machine it'll look like the holes are there, but a real reader wouldn't see them.

You could put transparent tape over a few of the holes. The common cheap, at-home card readers which read cards optically to save a few bucks will not notice the transparent window. But the Big Iron IBM punch card readers that use real steel fingers to read the holes will simply ignore the taped-over holes.

Along the same vein, you could put red colored tape over the holes, and build the Genuine IBM readers with blue laser readers instead of red. They'll be transparent to the at-home punch-card copy machines that use cheap red lasers, but opaque to the blue frequencies.

Or you could punch some extra or oversized holes in some non-standard locations, like the old half-tracks on the floppy disks. Only official IBM punch machines would be able to accurately copy them.

I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card, with some cryptographic verification or signature algorithm. As each punch card travels through the system, electrical contacts would verify the authenticity of the card. 4096-bit RSA on the chip ought to do the trick nicely.

Re:BINGO!

[timster]

Same as ever -- put the card in a cheap plastic sleeve, then make the user promise not to open it.

Re:BINGO!

[earlymon]

The parent is mostly correct regarding the Civil War and the wikipedia entry is lacking. I can't speak for the parent, but I am aware of this from a portion of James Burke's Day the Universe Changed series.

The punch card reading technology came from looms, sure - unless you count music boxes. Looms used continuous punched paper first - the music box again.

The punch card was used in 1880 US Census - that statistical application that you talk about - not so much because of the machinery to handle it - it was because of its size, and that was by design.

There were a glut of older cash drawers that could used for keeping the stacks neat and/or in sorted piles.

So, you've got the computing machinery and techniques in place - do you use a strip or a card? When using a card, do you contract to build new carrying boxes or do you re-purpose the vastly available and nearly-useless-therefore-cheap surplus cash drawers? Note the supporting statement from your own wiki reference:

The Columbia site says Hollerith took advantage of available boxes designed to transport paper currency.

I not sure about your analysis of why IBM grabbed the market over Univac. I do recall that in the old days, there was IBM and then there was BUNCH - Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell.

I think if you look back to 1929 and thereafter (read: the rebuilding of American business after the Great Crash), IBM was the key producer of cards and card-related technologies. So the real reason that IBM computers were compatible with the cards that corporations had was more likely that they were IBM cards in the first place.

IBM's history stretches continuously back to the 19th century, and its name means International Business Machines. Univac came from Remington Rand in 1950 - a large industrialist that made, among other things, typewriters, as I recall. So from the Great Crash to 1950, you have nothing from Univac to buy - but you do have IBM. Now computers come along, and the one company that survived the crash and is helping your business get Really Organized is selling you a new type of Business Machine - supply compatible with some of their old. Or - you could buy a Univac.

I could be wrong - I don't think I am, though, for what that's worth.

Re:BINGO!

[OlRickDawson]

I read the IBM reason in a computer history book, but I can't remember the name. The reasoning was as follows: Univac was the first company to sell computers commercially. All of their storage was on magnetic tape. IBM came out second, and built an interface to their existing punch card equipment. So, the question for businesses was, buy a univac computer and enter all of the information by hand, or buy an IBM and use the existing equipment.

Re:BINGO!

[earlymon]

OK, cool, I can see that. At the same time, I honestly wonder if it worked that well or if it was just part of IBM's sale's pitch.

In any case, I think it's pretty safe to say and bet that any of the BUNCH machines were better than the IBM - technically. But just like the Windows user's adherence to that OS because he has less change to cope with (insofar as his belief system supports) - if you did change, you were happier.

Can't fight marketing. You don't have to have the #1 product. Having the #2 product with a better rap and better positioning is often the way companies win.

Cheers!

Re:Lame Typing

[Achromatic1978]

You'd like to believe it was your Jesusphone being that intelligent, but in reality, the SMS standard has supported message concatenation for at least the last ten years, if not since its inception. My Nokia 2110e could turn it on and off, and you'd see the little counter for "remaining characters" go from 160 to 470 or so.

In other words

[EmagGeek]

Find a way to charge people a nickel to do something that we can provide them at no additional cost to us.

I love capitalism :)

Re:In other words

[MrMista_B]

Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?

Yes.

So why the snark?

Japan is a LOT smaller than the USA...

[DomNF15]

and it costs a lot less to upgrade their entire cell network, even if they are using vastly more expensive technology.
In fact, Japan land area: 377,835 square km

USA land area: 7,689,027 square km - you can fit quite a few Japans inside the USA.
This is the prime reason why US cell networks are so slow to get the latest and greatest...

Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes?

[ducomputergeek]

Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.

It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.

Re:Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes?

[RKThoadan]

Snopes says undetermined on that one... http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp

Re:Maybe the UK can tax these

[bazim2]

You jest but the UK used to have a mobile tax - at least for business accounts. It was introduced in 1991 by the then Conservative Chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont. This tax was repealed in 1999 by then Labour Chancellor (and now of course prime minister) Gordon Brown. One of his better decisions to cut taxes on an enabling technology.

Is it a cause or an effect?

[jcr]

160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

Perhaps it's a conditioned response to having only short messages available.

-jcr

Re:Standards that won't go away

[xaxa]

The ruts in Roman roads are 4'whatever wide because that's how wide the cart wheels were spaced.

Cart wheels were spaced that wide because that's what fits around two horses.

The first railways used horses to pull the loads.

The width of a horse hasn't changed since Roman times, so the width is the same.

Silly me.

[hrimhari]

Here I was, in my dumb ignorance caused by blind experience on the field, thinking that the limit was actually caused by the magic 255 number less protocol overhead (result: 140) plus 7-bit encoding compression (result: 160).

In 2009

[Tarlus]

And all these years later in 2009, I still have

Re:In 2009

[Tarlus]

to cut my message in half before I can send them.

Re:Obligatory - ought to be enough

[PPH]

If only we had a crystal ball and could see how a technology might be preferred 2 - 10 years from now!

Had Twitter been anticipated at the conception of mobile communications, cell phones would have been designed with dials.

How they got more characters.

[nilbog]

If anyone is interested - the way they got more characters available was by cutting down characters to 7bits instead of the normal 8, thus limiting the possible characters to 128.

1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter

That remark gives me a far more negative opinion of you than of her.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[UncleTogie]

Actually, I find the honesty refreshing.

The ones I have a low opinion of are the parents that insist "My child is really smart and beautiful! It's the school/teacher/environment to blame for my child's inability to multiply single-digit numbers without a calculator!"

Mayhaps if more parents took a realistic view of their crotch-fruit, we wouldn't have the self-absorbed, narcissistic bozos who feel entitled to do whatever they want.

...and before anyone asks, yes, I *am* a parent.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[EvolutionsPeak]

Well it's easier for the GP since it is some other guys crotch-fruit, not his.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

Actually, I find the honesty refreshing.

Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of. Disparaging his wife's child like that shows me that he's someone lacking in empathy or compassion.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[UncleTogie]

Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of.

Which makes her less stupid how?

I have friends that're dumb, and are the first to tell you "Ah ain't up on all that-thar book-larnin'..." I don't think any less of them for it, and they're some solid friends. Y'know, the kind you could trust at your back when the going gets nasty. Another fave anecdotal moment:

My dad retired to a rural area. A young couple {friends of the family} was getting married, and dad decided to give 'em a book on managing your budget. However, the young wife, barely 18, refused the gift. Dad asked why, and she explained that her husband, Reed wouldn't use it. Her exact words:

"Y'see, Reed don't read."

-blink-

Note, that wasn't "Reed can't read", or "Reed doesn't read much"... Now, you can call me ill-mannered for saying that Reed is probably not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but I'm telling you, some people are just plain dumb, whether it's politically correct to say so or not. That's the problem with the whole PC movement; you can polish a turd all you want, but it's still a turd. BTW, I'm not moderately hearing-impaired, I'm mostly deaf... and have no problems saying so.

Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[blahbooboo]

Mind you, my iPhone has no 160 character limit, I'm sure other smart phones just piece together the rapid recieving of messages in to one while the "dumb" phones display them in 160 character chunks.

I absolutely hate when my iPhone friends text me. I end up getting this stream of text messages that are received backwards and cause a lot of hassle just to understand the message on my cell phone.

It would be nice if the iPhone limited texts to 160 characters for those of us without the jesus phone (or a smart phone that supports it).

Oh wait... that's probably why Jobs did that :)

Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[Shin-LaC]

Posting to undo erroneous mod. Will also undo the other three mods I did on this page. There really ought to be a "cancel mod" button.

At 3600 baud, even

[Animats]

In AMPS, the cell phone technology being described, there's a 3600 baud control channel shared between all the phones in a cell. Text messages had to be crammed into that. Voice was analog FM, with the control channel telling the handsets which voice channel to use.

That's why SMS is so data-limited. The data channel was tiny.

I've seen stylus's and "stroke" entry.

[WoTG]

I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.

1. Handwriting recognition on a touchscreen, like a PDA. This, I saw a few years ago, I imagine it's a higher-end option.

2. Recognition based on strokes. It's like predictive text. There are only so many directions to draw the a stroke that combines to make the glyph. So you just pick them off the phone, I guess there's a standard pattern, like starting from the top left stroke.

Hopefully someone who knows more can provide more detail.

I remember when

[KingPin27]

64K should have been enough for everybody.

Makkonen vs. Hillebrandt

[Rovaani]

Hillebrandt is not the only one claiming to have invented SMS. Another contender is Finnish Matti Makkonen

ISDN & GSM

[Speedy09]

My understanding is that GSM protocols were largely inspired by ISDN protocols. ISDN had (has) the same short messaging capabilities on its 'D' channel which is the out of band signaling channel (2B+D). Most ISDN phones and Mac/PC softphones had messaging feature built-in.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[againjj]

Snopes. It also mentioned the space shuttle that another responder mentioned.