How many times have you tried using the SMS shortcuts, to try and limit it to 160 characters. Did that ever made you wonder, that why SMS are only limited to 160 characters? I had the urge to find out many times, but was too lazy to search it on Google, but I always knew it has something to do with Bits and Bytes Math 
. This really become a must know information as of now , as we have already celebrated SMS’s 15th Birthday couple of years back. 
Now, after Giz revealed the real reason why the sms are of 160 character , I found it real hard to digest as according to them
Apparently, it’s because some German dude thought 160 was "perfectly sufficient."
Friedham Hillebrand was a communications researcher who was working with a group on developing a standard for cellphones to send and receive text messages. So he sat down on his typewriter and banged out a bunch of random sentences and questions, counted up the number of characters it took, and decided 160 was the magic number.
I am not sure , whether this is the real reason , but it made me Google a bit, and I found the answer at Mattcopp’s blog. He explained it quite clearly
The issue is that it is a limitation of the GSM system. GSM is the name for the way in which almost all mobile phones communicate. The actual length of a text message is 256 characters or letters (the term characters are more exact because numbers are not letters and neither is % or #).
Now an SMS needs to have contained within itself who sent the message, when it was sent and who it is going too, these are called overheads and take up exactly 96 characters, which is why you end up with 160 characters left. (256-96=160).On a side note, each character is sent as an 8bit binary number — you know those 1s and 0s everyone is talking about — meaning you have a maximum of 256 types of characters. This gives you just enough room for all upper and lower case letters (2 * 26), numbers (0-9), a range of symbols ({}[]-+£$%) and some control characters (space, return, null). This is an internationally recognized standard specified as the ASCII standard.
Check out his post for more info on why SMS are actually 160 characters , and also some info on MMS size also.
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Nice info. I didn’t know this. I had read Gizmodo’s post and had assumed tht to be true.
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