[development] _drupal_wrap_mail_line()

[Charles Mattice]

Ahh, as crell once told me "OLD SKOLL". Little off subject but as we're 
reminiscing here a little, my first intro into cumputing was 1972 and 
fortran 4. Yep punch cards. I can remember my high school instructor 
chewing me out for putting a prime number program into a loop and used a 
whole box of paper. (He wasn't in the room when I started feeding the 
puch cards <G>).

Afterwards though I took up electronics for a while. fell off the radar 
till 84 when at a new job run on a ncr2100 with 12 inch floppies, no 
hard drive. Bought one of the first ibm pc's, had a whopping 128k of 
memory and a 10 meg hard drive. price of that unit was $16K. memory 
cards back then were either 32 or 64 bit chips and it was easier to 
replace a whole bank of chips rather than find the one that failed (They 
hadn't come out with the memory tracing programs back then). Then 10 meg 
harddrive took up both 5.25 in bays and the floppy drive took up the 
other 5.25.

Yep it had a 80 column monitor and was B/W, Ended up taking that box and 
hooking up to adds terminals to it and even with the other 2 terminals 
it would outrun the ncr 2100. That particular instance set me up as the 
computer guru there (HAha) and one of my many task was keeping the 
systems running. It also made me in charge of what was run on them. Back 
then you had very few choices, mainly dos and pick (a main frame db 
system which was originally hardware coded into machines such as 
fugitsu, ga automations, ncr's, etc..) nix was around back then but 
didn't really get into it too much.

I chose pick as it used the least resources and was faster than dos, and 
once again got into programming with basic (actually pick basis, picks 
version of basic that you could peek and poke into memory and also had 
some early C but in).

It's still my choice of languages today for business logic but overall I 
still prefer building servers and workstations over programming.

getting back to topic, I was taught that text emails, for readablility, 
should be 72 characters. It was a recommendation, not a must. The 72 
character pretty much gave you the look of a typewritter and gave room 
for a sense of a right magrin. I still have clients and associates who 
use, even prefer this style of email. I myself prefer text still over 
html but guess you could call that my "OLD SKOOL" preference.

As far as the sender goes in todays atmosphere, emails should be 
available in both text and html but it's still up to the receiver to 
determine their preference.

On 10/9/2010 9:11 AM, nan wich 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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