I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap

[Pat Farrell]

  tcmay at netcom.com (Timothy C. May)  writes:
> Oh, I'll go along with this. After all, this is partly why the terminal
> standard is about 80 columns (there may be some FORTRAN and CRT
> technology of the 1970s reasons as well).

Revisionist history!

CRT's were 80 columns because Hollerith cards were 80 columns. They had
been that size since the late 1800s.

70s compilers for Fortran and Cobol used the columns. Cobol had
A and B margins, Fortran had sequence numbers in columns 1 thru 6, and the
continuation column in 7. The compilers weren't changed just because
of a new fangled I/O device.

In the good old days, there were only two I/O sizes that counted,
80 and 132.

Pat

Pat Farrell      Grad Student                 pfarrell at cs.gmu.edu
Department of Computer Science    George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
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