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WHAT A LOAD OF BS! I get sick …

Comment posted on Why text messages are limited to 160 characters by Captain Jack

WHAT A LOAD OF BS! I get sick and tired of this myth being spread. Funny it surfaces in the news about every 4 to 6 years. No individual expert or company can claim to be the ‘father’ or ‘creator’ of the SMS. The GSM project as a whole was indeed a multi-national collaboration at its best.

The article states outright that the 160-character limit came before Hillebrand’s “typewriter experiment” and that the experiment actually came 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. For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn’t. They dropped letters.
- LAT- "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."

Why does the article structures it’s opening to suggest that Hillebrand pulled the number out of his arse after some typewriter time is a mystery.

As history has proven time and time again, you can’t believe everything you read especially from LA Times. Oh and that goes for what I say also. Don’t believe one word I type! Look it up!

What do I know about this SMS? I was typing 80 character messages on punch cards. Not related, but if you take to punch cards end on end you get 160 characters.

Captain Jack also commented

• Punched card or punch card as some people called it. I learned is at the Hollerith card but it was much different from the Standard 5081 card… Or one could call it the “EVIL IBM CARD!” If we ever called it an IBM card one would get punched in the arm or slapped behind the head.
  BTW as I was programing the card puncher to feed directly to the schools first ever Apple II computer. I’m so very glad our vice principle was a computer geek. I might not have gotten into computers if it wasn’t for him. Heck if it wasn’t for computers I would still be struggling with mathematics and English syntax. Oh that dreaded ‘Syntax Error’!!!! Wow, Im just remembering I learned so much information that is so useless and outdated. What a waste of brain cells.

  Ok Im off to bed. I have a maritime organization meeting at about 9 am. I need some sleep.

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