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Why COBOL has that 80 character limit. But for far reaching legacy hangovers, you can't beat the QWERTY keyboard when it comes to tech. A layout born to slow
by Zenst 7y ago
Why COBOL has that 80 character limit. But for far reaching legacy hangovers, you can't beat the QWERTY keyboard when it comes to tech. A layout born to slow down typists in a way to prevent the hammers jamming upon mechanical keyboards of old.
But the legacy of punched cards is deeper with that 80 character limit and bank card data formats and many other things had that character limit consideration come into play.
So if you ever see a data field that seems to arbitrary have around 70-80 characters(rest used for transaction ID, EOR char, checksum char(s) to pad the 70+ to the full 80 characters), it may well be down to punched cards if you go down the historical rabbit holes.
- masonic 7y agoA layout born to slow down typists in a way to prevent the hammers jamming... Myth. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
- rrss 7y agoThat article, and the source it references [1], are no more convincing than the sources that support this "myth". [1] bases it's conclusion primary on the assertions and opinions of the authors. > At least, in our opinion, T, the most frequently-used consonant, should have moved to the center of keyboard, W, the other semivowel, to the upper row, Q, less frequently-used letter, to the edge, and I, also used for thenumeral 1, near by 8 to type “1870” or “1871” rapidly ... After reading that article, I don't know why I should trust the opinion of those authors over the findings of every other author (which support the "myth"). It's pretty clear that the most common digrams are well separated in the typebar basket, with the exception of e+r, which is because 'r' and '.' were swapped by the manufacturers, not the designers. [1]: http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQ...