On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 10:56:48AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > On Fri, 10 May 2019 16:45:45 -0400 > "Tobin C. Harding" <me@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > I read once that they used 72 characters on punch cards at times because > > the other 8 characters got mangled for some reason. > > Those of use who worked in Fortran understand these things... columns > 73-80 were ignored by the compiler. The normal use was to put line > numbers in there to help recovery when you dropped your card deck on the > floor and had to unshuffle things. A diagonal line drawn across the > top of deck helped a lot, but it was good to have verification for the > marginal cases. > > Kids today just don't have any culture at all...:) I was just going through my editors init file and I see I have default column width for kernel RST files set to 75. Did you tell me that some time Jon, I vaguely remember? +1 for the trivia Cheers, Tobin.
