@Nancy My first classes were on the 80 column Hollerith Code and I spent some time as System 38 operator and programmer. I am making quite a nice retirement income on Drupal sites now.
David A. Shaver D. A. Shaver Web Design Web Page Design for Small Business www.dashaver.com On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 8:11 AM, nan wich <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, I am close to "retirement age" and had my 61st birthday yesterday. I > am not planning on retiring any time soon. > > Yes, I did actually use punch cards. When I started in "Data Processing" > there were no CRTs; electronically modified typewriters were state of the > art. The few disk drives had platters that measured in feet with heads that > were as big as your fist - oh, and held an incredible 5 mega bytes of data! > And if you wanted your program to run fast, you wrote in assembler language > because compilers (forget interpreted languages) produced pretty poor code. > > And you just filled in a mystery for me. Most computer languages only used > the first 72 characters of the card, leaving the last 8 for a sequence > number so you could put the cards into a mechanical sorter if you ever > dropped them. I always wondered where the 72 came from. > > Minor correction though: IBM's first CRT was the 2260, which had 12 lines > of 40 characters. It was a big improvement when the 3270 came out with 24 > lines of 80 characters. They later produced a version that would display up > to 132 characters (printer width). > > Yes, I had a Vic-20 with it's casette tape storage. I quickly upgraded to > the Commodore 64. Before the Vic-20, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 to produce > at-home banking. > > > *Nancy* > > Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. > King, Jr. > > > ------------------------------ > *From:* Earl Miles > > 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. >
