Re: 80 columns wide? 132 columns wide?

Swifty wrote:
132 came from the era of line printers. The IBM 3211 was the first that I encountered that would handle this width. It remains a number that I'm highly likely to chose in window widths (my command prompt, for example)

It goes back to the IBM 1403, which originally came in either 100 or 132 (120 was a later option). Almost everyone who got a 1403 went with 132, and it became the line-size norm for decades. (The 1403 was a top seller from 1960 to 1979, because the 3211, though twice as fast, was also twice as expensive; as a rule, only companies with big printing farms went with the 3211. Even the machine that finally replaced the 1403, the 3203, used a lot of 1403 parts.)

132 was also available in the second-generation 3270 screens, where it was mostly used by programmers to look at printouts.
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