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And what do we have now? Most people use iMessages or similar, which have arbitrary lengths, and allow much more descriptive and sensible messages. But not on twitter, where it's seen as some kind of hipster badge to be able to reword a thought into a 140 character haiku.

It's a bit silly.

And the SMS messages are limited by the size of the blocks of the first digital celular networks, that got that size because it was enough to fit a "phone #1111-1111, ring" message.

So, in no anybody tought abut what kind of textual content would fit that size. Or, in other words, it's arbitrary.

Not true. GSM texts are encoded in a 7-bit scheme, and twitter started using 8 bit encodings. 7 * 160 = 8 * 140.

Indeed; and the bit-packing code to convert 8 7-bit characters to 7 octets is a PITA (I wrote a Java SMS server)