Ahh, as crell once told me "OLD SKOLL". Little off subject but as we're
reminiscing here a little, my first intro into cumputing was 1972 and
fortran 4. Yep punch cards. I can remember my high school instructor
chewing me out for putting a prime number program into a loop and used a
whole box of paper. (He wasn't in the room when I started feeding the
puch cards <G>).
Afterwards though I took up electronics for a while. fell off the radar
till 84 when at a new job run on a ncr2100 with 12 inch floppies, no
hard drive. Bought one of the first ibm pc's, had a whopping 128k of
memory and a 10 meg hard drive. price of that unit was $16K. memory
cards back then were either 32 or 64 bit chips and it was easier to
replace a whole bank of chips rather than find the one that failed (They
hadn't come out with the memory tracing programs back then). Then 10 meg
harddrive took up both 5.25 in bays and the floppy drive took up the
other 5.25.
Yep it had a 80 column monitor and was B/W, Ended up taking that box and
hooking up to adds terminals to it and even with the other 2 terminals
it would outrun the ncr 2100. That particular instance set me up as the
computer guru there (HAha) and one of my many task was keeping the
systems running. It also made me in charge of what was run on them. Back
then you had very few choices, mainly dos and pick (a main frame db
system which was originally hardware coded into machines such as
fugitsu, ga automations, ncr's, etc..) nix was around back then but
didn't really get into it too much.
I chose pick as it used the least resources and was faster than dos, and
once again got into programming with basic (actually pick basis, picks
version of basic that you could peek and poke into memory and also had
some early C but in).
It's still my choice of languages today for business logic but overall I
still prefer building servers and workstations over programming.
getting back to topic, I was taught that text emails, for readablility,
should be 72 characters. It was a recommendation, not a must. The 72
character pretty much gave you the look of a typewritter and gave room
for a sense of a right magrin. I still have clients and associates who
use, even prefer this style of email. I myself prefer text still over
html but guess you could call that my "OLD SKOOL" preference.
As far as the sender goes in todays atmosphere, emails should be
available in both text and html but it's still up to the receiver to
determine their preference.
On 10/9/2010 9:11 AM, nan wich 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.
