A closer look
Friedhelm Hillebrand, a brilliant German telecommunications researcher, established the strict 160-character limit for standard SMS text messages in 1985 by sitting at his typewriter, counting the characters on random postcards, and concluding that people didn't need any more space than that to express a thought. His completely arbitrary, unscientific analysis of analog mail permanently dictated the communication habits of billions of people for decades, ultimately spawning the condensed, chaotic grammar of modern internet slang and eventually inspiring the character limits of Twitter, ensuring that all global political discourse would forever be compressed into bite-sized, context-free fragments of pure concentrated rage
