Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a

Indeed. They became popular on Usenet because of the 80-character line width limit. Because of the way text is wrapped and quoted on Usenet, link-mangling was a common and pretty annoying problem. IIRC, makeashorterlink.com was the first popular one, but for reasons that seem obvious and ironic now, tinyurl quickly supplanted it. Bit.ly was the first to really take domain name shortening to the extreme and was also the first to be popularised by Twitter.