Comment by evv
6 days ago
A few months ago I was asking myself, why is the "standard" width of a terminal 80 characters? I assumed it had to do with the screen size of some early PCs.
But nope, its because a punch card was 80 characters wide. And the first punch cards were basically just index cards. Another hat tip to the librarians.
I guess this is the computing equivalent of a car being the width of two horse's asses...
And the use of punch cards in computing is (arguably) inspired by the textile industry. Punched cards were used to configure looms starting way back in the 1700s.
For those who aren't already familiar, James Burke in Connections has a great summary/rundown of this technological progression from Jacquard loom to census tabulator to computer punchcard, starting around the 36 minute mark here (though the whole video is worth watching).
https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0?si=NtyyybZSGCKmktdG&t=2150
One of the teachers at my high school (40 years ago) somehow got permission to offer an entire class revolving around Connections. Several of my friends were taking it, so I decided to as well, and I had to drop band to make it fit.
Both band directors showed up at one of my classes the first day of school, dragged me to an empty room, and browbeat me into returning to band. It was the right choice for my social life, but I did hear great things about that class.