I thought it was particularly interesting that their research into message lengths involved both looking at old postcards and typing out random sentences.
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."
First, this strikes me as a particular German thing to say. I can picture a John Cleese caricature of a German blandly exclaiming "this is perfectly sufficient" during all sorts of typical German activities. Which apparently involve inventing both text messaging and counting the number of characters in a sentence.
What I was wondering when I read the article was whether Mr. Hillebrand was typing in English or German when he was conducting his research on that trusty type-writer of his. I would assume there could be a significant difference between sentence lengths in the two languages. German, after all, is the language that prides itself on have octosyllabic words and sentences that can run a page long.
Clearly Mr. Hillebrand wasn't typing out sample sentences from Adorno, but was that something that they were taking into account back when they were inventing the text message?
