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<DIV>Yes, I am close to "retirement age" and had my 61st birthday yesterday. I am not planning on retiring any time soon.</DIV>
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<DIV>Yes, I did actually use punch cards. When I started in "Data Processing" there were no CRTs; electronically modified typewriters were state of the art. The few disk drives had platters that measured in feet with heads that were as big as your fist - oh, and held an incredible 5 mega bytes of data! And if you wanted your program to run fast, you wrote in assembler language because compilers (forget interpreted languages) produced pretty poor code.</DIV>
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<DIV>And you just filled in a mystery for me. Most computer languages only used the first 72 characters of the card, leaving the last 8 for a sequence number so you could put the cards into a mechanical sorter if you ever dropped them. I always wondered where the 72 came from.</DIV>
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<DIV>Minor correction though: IBM's first CRT was the 2260, which had 12 lines of 40 characters. It was a big improvement when the 3270 came out with 24 lines of 80 characters. They later produced a version that would display up to 132 characters (printer width).</DIV>
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<DIV>Yes, I had a Vic-20 with it's casette tape storage. I quickly upgraded to the Commodore 64. Before the Vic-20, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 to produce at-home banking.<BR> </DIV>
<P><FONT face="bookman old style, new york, times, serif" color=#ff007f size=4><EM><STRONG>Nancy</STRONG></EM></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.</FONT></P>
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<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> Earl Miles</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif"></FONT><BR>On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote:<BR>> @Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous<BR>> reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a<BR>> punch card? I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards<BR><BR>Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt<BR>many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since<BR>people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement<BR>age by now.<BR><BR>80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from<BR>punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the<BR>common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC<BR>2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals<BR>failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in
order to<BR>be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were<BR>unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could<BR>get 40 CPL.<BR><BR>Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain,<BR>it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is<BR>text/html then wrapping is pointless.<BR></DIV></DIV></div></body></html>