72 inch wrap. Was: A Couple of Incoherent Questions

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 10:44:43PM -0500, Bill Mudry wrote:
> Hope you don't mind my asking, Lennart. How prevalent are 80 character
> displays these days anyways? With the high res displays many people
> have I would have thought that they would be largely a thing of the past.
> I use a resolution of 1280 x 1024.

I don't run X when I can avoid it.  I do use ssh to read me email
remotely and I tend to run 80x25 since some programs prefer it over
larger or smaller sizes.  Besides text starts to get really annoying to
read when the lines get longer than about 70 characters since you start
having to shift your view from side to side to read it.  If I do run X I
am much more likely to run two 80 character terminals side by side so I
can work on multiple things at the sime time.  Many good texteditors can
also do vertical splits on wide displays.

> Sure wish they put character rulers in email clients.I don't relish 
> literally
> counting out 72 characters each time I want to write a message to either
> list. Hmm <chuckle> maybe I should literally measure how much that is
> in inches with an actual ruler. That would be faster than counting ;-).
> Isn't there a point at which old standards are eventually abandoned in the
> Linux world? That 72 character wrap goes waaay back.

I am pretty sure even outlook has an option somehwere to set the auto
wrap number of characters.

As for abondoning standards, try writing your login name at the console
in all CAPS, and see what old standard that throws at you.  Some text
terminals only had caps and no lower case.  Ever wonder why all unix
commands are in lower case only?  It used to be when a single case
terminal logged in with all caps, since it couldn't even display lower
case (lack of font roms and such) the system would convert lower case to
upper case on output and upper case to lower case on input, and Linux
does that too.

Linux likes to maintain support for old hardware, if nothing else to
allow people who like old antiques to still be able to play with them,
rather than just look at them.  I currently have 3 Sun3's (two 50s and a
60), 3 Amiga 500s, 4 Decstation 5000s (3 240s and a 133), and an Athlon
700 PC.  All but the Amiga's are able to boot Linux 2.4 kernel at
this time.  The athlon runs 2.6 since it can.

Old standards don't die, even when people try to inflict inferior
'industry "standards" (or conventions)' on people.

Lennart Sorensen
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