Are 80 Columns Enough? 763
ThinkGeek writes "Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?"
Of course (Score:5, Funny)
just stupid, of course we know its plenty.
Be Glad You Don't Program Mainframe Cobol (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, my spelling of "you're" was wrong twice but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why is this an issue (Score:2, Funny)
80 Columns? LUXURY! (Score:5, Funny)
In my day, I saved up for a year, delivering papers in the rain, to buy a board for a video display that gave me 40 columns x 16 rows. And that felt like sheer luxury!
Before that, I just had a 2 x 7-segment display, showing the hex codes of the characters as they came out of the UART at 110bits/s, and I used to translate them from the ASCII in my head in real time. As for input, I used to write it down on a piece of paper, then toggle it in with binary switches.
The kids these days have lines of 160 chars or longer. And they're still not happy, they're begging their parents for wider and wider displays. Soon you'll need a 30-inch wide display with a maximised editor window just to see the source lines without wrapping. But at least the kids will be able to say "7 lines? You think that's cool? I did it in 1!"
Re:Be Glad You Don't Program Mainframe Cobol (Score:3, Funny)
Re:First Column! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:80 Columns? LUXURY! (Score:5, Funny)
In my day, we used primitive torches to burn binary dots onto chemically treated goat skin.
We then spent our evenings around the fire decoding the input, using sea shells with sand in them for each byte.
By morning, each shell was aligned and I could read the ASCII code out loud to debug my code.
For input, I used to craft copper drums out of ore and fuse the privative hand made capacitors to
each in a precise alignment. Then we entered in the machine code by charging
each capacitor we wanted with a simple clay jar battery and hand crafted wire mesh.
We did not have any electricity back then, so we had to hand crank the drums at a consistent
30 RPM as to synchronize it with the 60Hz clock of our main "Computer."
Re:80 Columns? LUXURY! (Score:4, Funny)
We used communicate in binary, we would poke each other with live AC wires, each shock was a 1, though we could never tell if a 0 was really a 0 so we had to constantly ask each other. Eventually we decided to implement parity, we would stamp each other on the foot for every 8-bits.
This did take a while, by the time we had communicated a paragraph of Words we had forgotten what the first few were.
Re:First Column! (Score:3, Funny)
Bigger Punch Cards? (Score:3, Funny)
Punch cards were based on the civil war era dollar bill. I cannot think of a currency in the world with a longer bill size than that (Somebody else know one?), so I can't think where we'd get the model. Maybe we'd make each card the size of an apartment lease.
I'm against it.
Re:80 Columns? LUXURY! (Score:5, Funny)
o
u
L
u
c
k
y
B
a
s
t
a
r
d
!
Re:80 Columns? LUXURY! (Score:3, Funny)