Timeline for Why is 80 characters the 'standard' limit for code width?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 7, 2023 at 18:24 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Mar 10, 2023 at 17:16 | |||||
| Jul 23, 2021 at 22:56 | comment | added | Martin Braun | I understand all the points you make and recognize them. Now make a HTML file with proper intention and see how far you come with a 80 characters limit. It feels inconsistent with languages that simply frustrate one that tries to adapt those standards, but I guess this is just a luxury problem. | |
| Feb 8, 2021 at 15:10 | comment | added | Jeyekomon | @Blrfl The precise origins of the dimensions of US letter-size paper are not known. | |
| Jul 7, 2016 at 8:27 | comment | added | Maxime R. | There's a nice post on this: The Tyranny of the Hollerith Punched Card | |
| Sep 15, 2015 at 16:49 | comment | added | dberm22 | @Blrfl But that then begs the question why typewriters are typically 10 pitch. | |
| Aug 17, 2012 at 13:56 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Aug 17, 2012 at 13:58 | |||||
| May 18, 2012 at 11:48 | comment | added | Blrfl | The Pica typeface, which originated in the late 1700s and was used on typewriters, is typically 10 pitch. That puts 80 columns across a letter-sized page. I won't speculate about Why letter-sized pages are the size they are or what that has to do with railroad gauges or the ancient Romans. :-) | |
| May 17, 2012 at 18:38 | comment | added | Jesse C. Slicer | @fredley currency was that size so they could fit 80 characters of text on it ;-) | |
| May 16, 2012 at 22:01 | comment | added | Bill K | @hotpaw2 The spacing and size of the holes looks similar to those used by player pianos, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they were reusing technology if not actual components. | |
| May 16, 2012 at 11:59 | comment | added | Mark Schultheiss | There were also a LOT of early dot matrix printers that had an 80 character width limit - ( and some/later wide ones with 132 characters) - so you had some 132 width stuff early on as well. | |
| May 16, 2012 at 11:50 | comment | added | mplungjan | Later 72 chars because of this: 3270 editor | |
| May 15, 2012 at 23:13 | comment | added | fredley | @AlBiglan Why was currency that size? | |
| May 15, 2012 at 20:15 | comment | added | hotpaw2 | One reason for the card size has been given. How about a reason for the size and spacing of the holes required for the result to be 80? | |
| May 15, 2012 at 17:39 | comment | added | Cthutu | 80 columns does derive from punched cards (and that's why line numbers were used too because if you dropped a stack of punched cards you didn't need to sort them). 132 columns probably derived from the standard width of printer paper. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 17:30 | comment | added | Al Biglan | The cards are that size because in 1890, CTR wanted to reuse currency carriers (the dollar was bigger back then) to carry the census data cards. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 16:38 | comment | added | Kaz | Don't forget PC text mode. BIOS and DOS: 80 columns. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 15:02 | history | edited | gnat | CC BY-SA 3.0 | punch card += http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card "Wikipedia article about punched card" |
| May 15, 2012 at 14:51 | comment | added | user54095 | @FactorMystic - the punch card size was based on the size of the currency back in the late 1880's's when Hollerith designed them to assist with the 1890's census. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 14:23 | comment | added | Factor Mystic | Now the question is: Why did the IBM punch card have 80 columns? | |
| May 15, 2012 at 14:19 | comment | added | Tim Lesher | @hydroparadise 132 columns is a carryover from line printer carriage widths. It was also standardized as an optional "extended" limit in one of the later Fortran versions, I believe. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 14:01 | comment | added | Chad Harrison | @LapTop006 I am curious about the 132 standard now. Is that also a cary over from punch cards?s | |
| May 15, 2012 at 12:37 | comment | added | Jamie Taylor | An old lecturer of mine gave me one of his old punch cards, I have no idea what the code represented on it does, but it makes a great bookmark and conversation piece. I was thinking of laminating it for posterity, but was afraid that it'd ruin it. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 11:46 | comment | added | Oded | @LapTop006 - Well, yes, but that's the historical start of the "standard"... | |
| May 15, 2012 at 11:43 | comment | added | LapTop006 | After that early teletypes, and later video terminals used 80 columns (and then 132 columns) as a standard width. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 11:21 | vote | accept | fredley | ||
| May 15, 2012 at 10:46 | history | answered | Oded | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
