If you are a user of twitter, you would have noticed that twitter limited the number of characters in a message to 140 characters, reason is that, if the 140 characters are used, there will be spaces left for username and the colon in front of the message, since a standard SMS is 160 characters or lesser.
German engineer Friedhelm Helebrand has been credited with creating the SMS. He came up with the idea of making SMS messages 160 characters because text messages were limited to 128bytes only.