3 ms·
It's great to see the old 80-column punched card standard fossilised in these modern environments...
by Chinasol 12y ago
It's great to see the old 80-column punched card standard fossilised in these modern environments...
- XorNot 12y ago80 columns gives you 3 files side-by-side on a 1920 monitor.
- skj 12y agoSurely that depends on more than just the number of columns and the number of pixels.
- wpietri 12y agoAnd my understanding is that we got punched cards of that size because they fit into the boxes and drawers for large-format US banknotes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-sized_note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-sized_note Which in turn apparently goes back to taking a common paper size and cutting it into reasonably-sized pieces: http://ask.metafilter.com/262846/What-is-the-origin-of-the-dimensions-of-large-sized-US-dollar-bills http://ask.metafilter.com/262846/What-is-the-origin-of-the-d... So apparently one person lost to history said, "How big should it be? I don't know. Maybe about this big?" Centuries later, somebody at IBM said, "It looks like we could fit 80 columns on that. Good enough?"
- kps 12y agoHollerith cards originally had 45 columns.
- kps 12y agoLine length around 80 columns come from letter paper in a typewriter (via teleprinters) which in turn comes from book printing, where around 60–65 printed characters (plus blanks) were established as most readable centuries ago.