As communication protocols go, SMS (or Short Message Service) hails from a Nordic birthplace, the same land that brought us Nokia, the once (and hopefully future) king of mobile. The protocol has a deep past from its most nascent and infant steps to its eventual maturity in the form that we see today. According to an article at The Next Web the first text message happened to be “Merry Christmas” (via Wikipedia.)

Sent 3 December, 1992 keyed by engineer Neil Papworth of the British technology company Sema and sent across wire and cable to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis who received the message on his Orbitel 901 handset. (If you’ve ever seen one of these phones, “handset” is not what comes to mind—but there we go.)

However, text messaging vis-à-vis SMS is a different story.

In much the say way it’s a misnomer to say that modern carriers support 4G when we’re still in the midst of 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution) which will turn eventually into 4G; early SMS wasn’t the mature 160 character service that we know now.

“Text messaging may be 19, but SMS is much younger,” explains Mark Hopkins, editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. “The first version of the spec was penned in 1998, and the next revision (which I worked on at my time in Nokia) we finished in 1999.”

The text messaging technology might have been embedded in the GSM protocol as early as 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert; but even by 1992 the underlying pathways that make SMS function didn’t fully exist yet. Messages sent via text messaging still had to translate from exchange servers and use SMTP (e-mail) to connect the distances.

“SMS is much more of an important milestone than text messaging (IMHO) since it allowed inter-carrier text communication. Prior to that, any text communication between carriers had to be routed through text-to-email gateways (which didn’t always exist). The length that a text message could be differed greatly between carriers because each text-to-email gateway put different pieces of kruft and headers at the top and bottom of messages.”

So, SMS as a mature service is much closer to only 12 years old; whereas the text messaging that grew into the modern, mature short message service has turned 19. Nokia rode the forefront of that wave by offering the first commercially available text messaging service in Finland that used the standard embedded in the GSM protocol in 1993–so it’s fitting they matured the standard to what we have today.

The 140 character limit of Twitter messages can also be explained by the 160 characters of SMS messages. During his initial foray into GSM, Friedhelm Hillebrand found that most sentences came in under 160 characters apiece and so he used that as his unit-length for messages in 1985. The length then simply grandfathered itself into the larval SMS protocol and Twitter simply chose the number to keep themselves within the protocol’s length.