🚀 go-pugleaf

Right,  You're certainly old school :-)

Of course, there serves no justice to summarize history in just a msg or
two. Yes, much of it was due to punch cards mentality, after all, teletypes,
terminals was just a emulation of the punch cards and when programming
"jobs" it wasn't imaginable to want to "word wrap" into the next cards,
although it was possible by punching a hole in column 6  for FORTRAN people
:-)

While "GUI" has allowed for widening widths at the user level, as you say,
its still all dependent on backend, legacy and/or heterogeneous transports
and storage concepts. :-)

BTW, we were using Fidonet to transfer mail/files between mixed storage
systems.  I get the limits the fidonet packets had off hand, but I'm pretty
sure it was <80.  Don't remember.  But doing the gates, I recall there were
a few mail hosting systems who used 28-30 to maybe 50-72 characters fields
and much of it because part of line display was taken up by the field
description any/or prompts.

For example:

From: [....]   Date: [...]
To:   [...]    Flags
Subject: [......]

So it was a battle of ergonomics, esthetics, pareto's principle (80/20 rule)
to get the most of what you can on one page without over doing it.

When internetworking came around, I recall the mental battles such as:

Enter your email address: [.... remaining width of screen-2.....]

That only leaves 50-52 clean one line inputs :-)

Of course, we evolved and used two lines to get a little more:

Enter your email address below:
[.... width of screen .....]


--
Hector Santos, Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com






"Mark Crispin" <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU> wrote in message
news:Pine.OSX.4.64.0511280941280.562@pangtzu.panda.com...
> Although the ongoing use of 24x80 windows is certainly due to the memories
> of "old school programmers", the recommended limitations of lines to fit
> within 80 characters has an older cause.
>
> In the "small-i internet" (when networks with different protocols were
> interconnected for email) of two decades ago, it was impossible to
> transmit mail reliably across non-TCP/non-SMTP networks unless it fit
> within an 80 character line.  Punch card image was a particularly
> important concept in some of these.
>
> Today, the "small-i internet" is more of a memory in the minds of
> oldtimers; but it never has been certified as dead, extinct, vanished.
> Thus, there is a reluctance to relax the limit, and thus risk breaking
> some vestigal piece of "small-i internet"; especially as such may be in
> some pathetic little Third World twarf that doesn't have much of a chance
> of getting real Internet ("large-I Internet") before the sun novas.
>
> Quite a few email technology rules are in place to benefit some ancient
> facility that, for one reason or other, can't be updated.
>
> As a practical matter, it really doesn't matter what the line lengths are.
> Flowed text and quoted-word continuation rules exist so that users should
> neither know, nor particularly care, how the bits are represented.  The
> only people who should care are programmers who write email clients.
>
> In typography, most text has considerably narrower margins than 80
> characters to enhance readability.  Typewriters typically have their
> margins set at 65.  Books (excluding geek technical books) have narrower
> margins.
>
> -- Mark --
>
> http://panda.com/mrc
> Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
> Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.