Unfortunately I know this one from painful experience... It's from the dumb terminal days, when that's all those old ASCII displays could fit. 80 columns wide, by 25 (or sometimes 24) rows of ASCII goodness.
Even more painful than the terminals themselves was the 'technology' that created campus-wide (or even wide-area!) serial networks resplendent with serial Multiplexers, Altos TCUs and other awesomeness. Ah, the good old days of resoldering TCU interconnect cables that had cold-soldered short circuits to their grounding/ shielding lines, rendering entire sections of the campus offline. Why did Unix systems routinely run for years? Because if you rebooted one, every terminal in the place was down for a minimum of 15 minutes while the server ran through it's eISA configs, POSTs, SCSI disk and tape drive initialization and other fun. Deploy a reliable system so that you don't have to suffer the wrath of the entire place as they waited, oh so impatiently, for the system to come back up... R Rubin Bennett rbTechnologies, LLC 1970 VT Route 14 South East Montpelier, VT 05651 (802)223-4448 http://thatitguy.com "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." Voltaire, Essay on Tolerance French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778) -----Original Message----- From: Marc Farnum Rendino [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:36 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Noob question And where, class, did the 80 character limit come from?...
