On 1/23/13 4:45 PM, David Morris wrote:
VDTs with long lines might have been inspired by line printers or just the idea that long lines were better.
Definitely inspired by printers. I remember when we upgraded our ancient VT100 terminals (which didn't have wide mode) to VT220 terminals and you could display your output spool file (which was 132 column wide) on the screen without stupid wrapping and without having to print it out on the green and white bar paper. Ah, the things that excited us back then.
No experience there, but I'm pretty certain there were no 132 column punch cards in common use which would have influnced comody VDT designers. 80 and I believe 96 in S/3 days.
Yup, cards were 80 column and printouts were 132. And of course if you left your VT220 in 132 column mode while you were writing code and accidentally went over the 80 column limit on a line or two, when you sent your job off to VM/CMS, you'd get back an error that your job failed due to "Card reader jam". Gotta love it.
pr -- Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/> Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478