Why wrap @ 80?

[John Macdonald]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:04:55PM -0400, Rob Sutherland wrote:
> Hooo boy, am I dating myself. Yep, that's right, 80 columns or less is built 
> into a *lot* of older stuff. It would be nice if there was some standard way 
> for all readers and backend processes to handle formatting, but we're not there
> yet :-(
> 
> It's quite fascinating how that 80 column limit still hangs around. It started on 
> punch cards, then the first terminals used it because they were mainly used to enter 
> data to programs that expected card images and it just keeps lurking :-)

Terminals also used 80 columns because that was a
comfortable match to the limits of hardware of the
day - both for computing and generating the image in
real time with the number of electronic components
that made economic sense, and for the limits of the
CRT display.

For a while, terminal manufacturers used advancing
capabilities to provide better displays at the same
resolution (going from 4x6 or 5x7 pixels per character
to finer grained images of much improved readability
while remaining at 24 lines of 80 characters.

When DEC came out with the VT100 they offered the
option of switching display width from 80 columns
to 132 - they could do this because display and
controller technology was then capable of providing a
readable image at the higher resolution. 132 columns
matched typical line printer widths, so that instead
of just matching the "standard" input format,
you could display the "standard" output format.
That was the original instance of WYSIWYG, from before
printers and displays acquired the full graphic image
capability required for for huge numbers of fonts
with dynamic character widths and such.

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml