Alone in a room 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.
"This
is perfectly sufficient," he recalled thinking during that epiphany of
1985, when he was 45 years old. "Perfectly sufficient."
The
communications researcher and a dozen others had been laying out the
plans to standardize a technology that would allow cellphones to
transmit and display text messages.
Because of tight bandwidth constraints of the wireless networks at the
time -- which were mostly used for car phones -- each message would have
to be as short as possible.
Before his typewriter experiment,
Hillebrand had an argument with a friend about whether 160 characters
provided enough space to communicate most thoughts. "
My friend said this was impossible for the mass market," Hillebrand said. "I was more optimistic."
His
optimism was clearly on the mark. Text messaging has become the
prevalent form of mobile communication worldwide. Americans are sending
more text messages than making calls on their cellphones, according to a Nielsen Mobile report released last year.
U.S.
mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second
quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.
Texting
has been a boon for telecoms. Giants Verizon Wireless and AT&T each
charge 20 to 25 cents a message, or $20 for unlimited texts. Verizon
has 86 million subscribers, while AT&T's wireless service has 78.2
million.
And Twitter, the fastest growing online social
network, which is being adopted practically en masse by politicians,
celebrities ...
...
and news outlets, has its very DNA in text messaging. To avoid the need
for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts,
the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user's unique address.
Back in 1985, of course, the guys who invented Twitter were probably still playing with Matchbox cars.
Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand
Hillebrand
found new confidence after his rather unscientific investigations. As
chairman of the nonvoice services committee within the Global System for
Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the
majority of the global mobile market, he pushed forward the group's
plans in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, they decreed,
must support the short messaging service (SMS).
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. Voice communication
itself had taken place via a separate signal.
"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system."
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.
Still, his committee wondered, would the
160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of
communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial
assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said.
For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.
Second,
they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent
telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a
technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually
about the same length as postcards.
Just look at your average
e-mail today, he noted. Many can be summed up in the subject line, and
the rest often contains just a line or two of text asking for a favor or
updating about a particular project.
But length wasn't SMS's only
limitation. "The input was cumbersome," Hillebrand said. With multiple
letters being assigned to each number button on the keypad, finding a
single correct letter could take three or four taps. Typing out a
sentence or two was a painstaking task.
A GSM document outlining the definition of SMS. Credit: Friedhelm Hillebrand.
Later,
software such as T9, which predicts words based on the first few
letters typed by the user, QWERTY keyboards such as the BlackBerry's and
touchscreen keyboards including the iPhone's made the process more
palatable.
But even with these inconveniences, text messaging took
off. Fast. Hillebrand never imagined how quickly and universally the
technology would be adopted. What was originally devised as a portable
paging system for craftsmen using their cars as a mobile office is now
the preferred form of on-the-go communication for cellphone users of all
ages.
"N
obody had foreseen how fast and quickly the young people would use this," Hillebrand said. He's still fascinated by stories of young couples breaking up via text message.
When he tells the story of his 160-character breakthrough, Hillebrand says, people assume he's rich. But he's not.
There
are no text message royalties. He doesn't receive a couple of pennies
each time someone sends a text, like songwriters do for radio airplay.
Though "that would be nice," Hillebrand said.
Now Hillebrand lives
in Bonn, managing Hillebrand & Partners, a technology patent
consulting firm. He has written a book about the creation of GSM, a
$255 hardcover tome.
Following
an early retirement that didn't take, Hillebrand is pondering his next
project. Multimedia messaging could benefit from regulation, he said.
With so many different cellphones taking photos, videos and audio in a
variety of formats, you can never be sure whether your friend's phone
will be able to display it.
But he's hoping to make a respectable salary for the work this time
