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Where TFA goes from talking about punch cards to 35mm film with audio track to 4:3 film and CRT aspect ratios, there's a disconnect: there's nothing to tie film

Where TFA goes from talking about punch cards to 35mm film with audio track to 4:3 film and CRT aspect ratios, there's a disconnect: there's nothing to tie film/TV aspect ratios to punch cards. TFA then tries to construct a tie from: > Fascinatingly, the early versions of the ECMA-48 standard specify that this standard isn’t solely meant for displays, specifying that “examples of devices conforming to this concept are: an alpha-numeric display device, a printer or a microfilm output device.” TFA should know that terminals evolved to be a keyboard + printer before they evolved to be a keyboard + CRT. I'm not sure that there's any link between paper size and CRT size. Most likely the only connection would be number of columns (of fixed-width text), but not lines. My guess is that in the end there's no connection between punch cards and terminals being 80x25, much less between Civil War Demand Notes and terminals being 80x25. 80x25 was just convenient for all the independent reasons TFA lists. Any similarity to punch cards was almost certainly coincidental, and perhaps convenient.

Doxin 7y ago
> I'm not sure that there's any link between paper size and CRT size. Most likely the only connection would be number of columns (of fixed-width text), but not lines I haven't got a solid answer here, but I do know from experience that your average typewriter does about 80 characters across a page once you account for margins. Now clearly that'd not be much of an argument if margins are arbitrary but I don't think they are. On a typewriter your can more or less freely choose the top, left, and right margin. The bottom margin is however limited by the mechanism: by the time the bottom of the page is under the striking area the paper is flopping in the breeze since the roller isn't holding it anymore. If you set the left and the right margins (and the top margin) to the same size as the minimum workable bottom margin you end up with roughly 80 characters across the page. Seems as likely a link as any: typing out tabular data from a punch card would be limited to the same width as common on typewriters.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  Sure, but all these links (like the 2KB link) seem a bit coincidental. Of course, 2KB would fit other combinations of columns and lines, and typewrites (I think? I don't have one at hand!) probably do manage to fit more than 25 lines of single-spaced text with normal margins... My guess is that matching typewriter (and/or punchcard) width was more important than matching length, so with 1KB and 2KB, terminal manufacturers used as many lines as they could fit while using 80 column lines. Display width is probably more important than display length for us humans.

Doxin 7y ago

> I'm not sure that there's any link between paper size and CRT size. Most likely the only connection would be number of columns (of fixed-width text), but not lines I haven't got a solid answer here, but I do know from experience that your average typewriter does about 80 characters across a page once you account for margins. Now clearly that'd not be much of an argument if margins are arbitrary but I don't think they are. On a typewriter your can more or less freely choose the top, left, and right margin. The bottom margin is however limited by the mechanism: by the time the bottom of the page is under the striking area the paper is flopping in the breeze since the roller isn't holding it anymore. If you set the left and the right margins (and the top margin) to the same size as the minimum workable bottom margin you end up with roughly 80 characters across the page. Seems as likely a link as any: typing out tabular data from a punch card would be limited to the same width as common on typewriters.

cryptonector 7y ago
Sure, but all these links (like the 2KB link) seem a bit coincidental. Of course, 2KB would fit other combinations of columns and lines, and typewrites (I think? I don't have one at hand!) probably do manage to fit more than 25 lines of single-spaced text with normal margins... My guess is that matching typewriter (and/or punchcard) width was more important than matching length, so with 1KB and 2KB, terminal manufacturers used as many lines as they could fit while using 80 column lines. Display width is probably more important than display length for us humans.