Printing industry have not been anything close to forever, even writing is relatively novel compared to human spoken languages.

All that said, I'm interested with this 132 number, where does it come from?

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Joker_vD 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

"Since forever" as in, "since the start of electronic computing"; we started printing the programs out on paper almost immediately. The 132 columns comes from the IBM's ancient line printers (circa 1957); most of other manufacturers followed the suit, and even the glass ttys routinely had 132-column mode (for VT100 you had to buy a RAM extension, for later models it was just there, I believe). My point is, most of the people did understand, back even in the sixties, that 80-columns wide screen is tiny, especially for reading the source code.

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dcminter 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Printers aside the VT220 terminal from DEC had a 132 column mode. Probably it was aping a standard printer column count. Most of the time we used the 80 column mode as it was far more readable on what was quite a small screen.

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guenthert 4 days ago | parent [-]

Not only a small screen by modern standards, but the hardware lacked the needed resolution. The marketing brochure claims a 10x10 dot matrix. That will be for the 80 column mode. That works out to respectable 800 pixel horizontally, barely sufficient 6x10 pixel in 132 column mode. There was even a double-high, double-width mode for easier reading ;-)

Interesting here perhaps is that even back then it was recognized, that for different situations, different display modes were of advantage.

	▲	dcminter 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> There was even a double-high, double-width mode for easier reading I'd forgotten that; now that waa a fugly font. I don't think anyone ever used it (aside from the "Setup" banner on the settings screen) I think the low pixel count was rather mitigated by the persistence of phospher though - there's reproductions of the fonts that had to take this into account; see the stuff about font stretching here: https://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs

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bloak 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The IBM 1403 line printer, apparently.