I too grew up on DecWriters writing MACRO-10 on TOPS-10 in high school. My favorite was the LA120 that I could change the character pitch and get 132 columns on 8.5" paper when we ran out of the wide stuff.

To this day, 80 columns just doesn't do it for me. I generally comment - a LOT - and in C the comments will stretch out past 80 columns easily.

On 11/8/2017 5:17 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:

I do recall 80 column monitors, but I started on 132 column decwriter IIs and hence have never had sympathy for 80 columns. It's weird that so

Interesting.  I wonder if that's where the 132 column (alternative) standard came from.  I.e. XTerm's "Allow 80/132 Column Switching" option in the VT Options menu.

VT100's had a 132 column mode. I wrote a terminal emulator for the IBM-XT circa 1985 to do 132 columns in it's highest-resolution. I couldn't take 80 columns, even back then ;)