Anton Aylward wrote:
One funny thing is - the standard IBM line length is 80 chars, which goes all the way back to punchcards. I have not worked with punchcards myself, but IBM JCL is nothing but "screen" punchcards.
I had to for a very short time. I hated it and soon found a PDP-11 running RSTS that supported RJE. That PDP-11 was then knobbled by some post-grads to run UNIX version 5, and I didn't want to let go, so they took me along as test case for their work on compiler development and I got to play with the new languages they were dreaming up. And UNIX. Eventually I did system and kernel hacking on V6 and V7, then on System III and System V commercially.
A looong time ago, I had a PDP11-04 in my basement - I still have the main processor card somewhere. Four 4-bit TTL 74ALU's. Bitslicing.
However, think about how often we limit ourselves to 80 chars - in email, in code, everywhere. If it wasn't for punchcards, we wouldn't have a continuation character.
Yes, but there's a lot about UNIX and the 'Net which doesn't acknowledge line length.
Definitely.
Strictly speaking email doesn’t limit itself to 80 columns.
I know it's mostly a convention now, the RFC says 998 per line.
Even the linux kernel likes the 80 character limit:
"The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a strongly preferred limit."
That's about readability of the sources. The kernel itself has no such requirement.
Well, that's not important - the key thing is that the 80 characters ,just like the old-fashioned 80x25 video format, can be traced by to ancient IBM punchcards. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.9°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org