In answering a question I had been thinking about, here’s a fun little game of connect the dots.

A German man with a typewriter is responsible for the entire existence of URL shorteners. Here’s how:

25 years ago, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at typewriter in his home in Germany and typed out sentences and questions. Eventually he realized that most lines ended up with less than 160 characters. He decided that this number, 160, was “sufficient” for text based communication.

Hillebrand also happened to be the chairman of the nonvoice services committee in the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM). He pushed for, and got, the 160 character limit that we still use for SMS messaging on phones today. Unintentional Consequences

Moving forward a few years, a little site called Twitter decided that it was going to set it’s status update message size at 140 characters. Why? Because they wanted users to be able to see status updates on their cell phones via text message. Therefore to get the users name plus their message, they had to cut the length.

As Twitter grew, it’s purpose, focus, and usage changed to the point where sharing links became a major element of the service. However, many URLs were too long to include in tweets with any type of context.

Enter services like bit.ly or tinyurl which exist to substitute long URLs with short ones, making it possible to include in tweets.

And there you go. German man with typewriter to SMS character limit to Twitter character limit to bit.ly.

Here’s the original article from 5/09 in the L.A. Times with more background, etc.