
Why is 80 characters the 'standard' limit for code width? - sathyabhat
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/148677/427
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hsmyers
The way I remember it was a bit more complicated. IBM initial card size was
originally based on the size of a bank note. To say the IBM just had 80
columns isn't enough, they also toyed with a 96 column card as well. And I
wouldn't be surprised if first Jacquard and then Babbage are in this chain of
causation also.

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indiecore
It's really interesting how standards just come out of stuff like this. Why
are cars the size they are now? Because the Romans said that a cart can't be
wider than two mules and designed their roads thusly, every bit of
transportation technology in the past two thousand years has been affected by
this rule. Even just yesterday I had to pick a length to cut news story
previews to for a sidebar. I picked 140 chars solely because it looks
"familiar" because of Twitter, which has that limit because of text messaging
which has THAT limit because they guy who designed the protocol sat down at a
typewriter and typed himself a bunch of sentences that were about that length.

Odd right?

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conanite
Here's a longer version of the Roman two-horse story and how it impacted space
shuttle design:

<http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html>

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fredley
That's fascinating! The comments on the question seem to following a similar
pattern: Why 80 colums wide? - because of the size of the card. Why that size
of card? - because it matches the size of the currency (apparently).

