Origin of SMS short forms

This is an interesting conversation i had with one of my close buddy who used to trouble me by sending SMS in short forms and i had trouble reading it and making sense out of it. She came up with a real good explanation about the origination of short forms in SMS today.

It all started back in their college days it seems where people used to SMS like crazy and all service providers were offering nice offers with free SMS. One fine day they decide to cut short on the free SMS for whatever reason and these ppl who have been SMS-ing for long went crazy & couldnt change their behavior as it had become their habit by now. Looks like if an SMS crosses certain characters will be regarded as second SMS (this was news for me). So they came up with all short forms to avoid the second SMS.

And another obvious reason would have been to make it easier to type messages since the phone doesnt come with QWERTY keyboard installed.