Why SMS has a 160 Character limit?

SMS was designed to deliver short bursts of data such as numerical pages. To avoid overloading the system with more than the standard forward-and-response operation, the inventors of SMS agreed on a 160-character maximum message size. But the 160-character limit is not absolute. Length limitations may vary depending on the network, phone model and wireless carrier. Some phones don't allow you to keep typing once the 160-character limit is reached. You must send your message before continuing. However, some services will automatically break any message you send into chunks of 160 characters or less. So, you can type and send a long message, but it will be delivered as several messages.

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