In 1985, alone 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.

Los Angeles Times, May 3