
Ask HN: Why are the titles 80 chars? - tapper
Come on man, even Twitter had 140.
======
downerending
80 is a magic number for anyone who's been in the computer industry for a
while.

~~~
mdorazio
Did you purposely make a comment 80 characters long?

~~~
downerending
I totally meant to do that.

Also, do you always count characters in comments, or just this once?

~~~
mdorazio
I wanted to see how long a full 80-character title would be and used your
comment as a test. Lo and behold... exactly 80.

------
_0ffh
I suppose because of a historical text mode screen width (80x25 and later
80x43 and 80x50 were all widely used de facto standards).

------
weef
It's the number of columns on an IBM type punch card.

~~~
rolph
nostalgia here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card)

------
sloaken
If your title is more than 80 characters, maybe you do not understand what a
title is. Personally I think 80 is way to much.

