[development] _drupal_wrap_mail_line()

[David Shaver]

@Nancy

My first classes were on the 80 column Hollerith Code and I spent some time
as System 38 operator and programmer. I am making quite a nice retirement
income on Drupal sites now.

David A. Shaver
D. A. Shaver Web Design
Web Page Design for Small Business
www.dashaver.com




On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 8:11 AM, nan wich <nan_wich at bellsouth.net> wrote:

>  Yes, I am close to "retirement age" and had my 61st birthday yesterday. I
> am not planning on retiring any time soon.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
>
> *Nancy*
>
> Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L.
> King, Jr.
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>  *From:* Earl Miles
>
> On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote:
> > @Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous
> > reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a
> > punch card?  I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards
>
> Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt
> many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since
> people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement
> age by now.
>
> 80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from
> punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the
> common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC
> 2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals
> failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in order to
> be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were
> unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could
> get 40 CPL.
>
> Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain,
> it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is
> text/html then wrapping is pointless.
>
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