3 ms·

I find it a good capture of the the ‘M$’ vibes of the early 2000s. Someone is angry that emails are no longer formatted to 78 monospace characters.

• dspillett 4y ago
  > 78 monospace characters I recall 72 being more common. This left room for a few nested quotes (indented each level by >[space]) before needing to reflow the text to fit in 78, the 78 coming from back in the days of text terminals 80 characters wide (leaving two for a border or for formatting marks or for other decoration/indicators). Maybe that was a more localised thing (I'm remembering it from guidelines for mailing lists and/or Usenet groups) and a flat 78 character guideline was more usual around the wider internet?
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  For what it's worth, Windows-1252 pretending to be ISO 8859-1 still makes my life difficult every now and then. Windows' smart quotes not being encoded using the proper unicode characters can cause tons of issues when editors try to use smart quotes (encoding quotes as 0x93 instead of \u201C). It's especially silly considering Microsoft had already switched to UCS-2 in the OS long before XP came out and UCS-2 also has the standard quotes in its set. Complaining that programs aren't inserting unnecessary line feeds anymore is just silly, though. DOS needed those characters because of technical limitations and if people aren't working around your computer's arbitrary limitations anymore, that's really your problem more than anyone else's. Their website (http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/ http://www.chebucto.ca/~ak621/DOS/) is still up and is actively being maintained. I wonder if the author still uses DOS every day...