On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote: > @Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous > reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a > punch card? I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards
Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement age by now. 80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC 2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in order to be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could get 40 CPL. Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain, it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is text/html then wrapping is pointless.
