[TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, John Cowan wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> I click but I mostly live in
>> terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
>> width (I can go on and on about that).
>>
>
> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes that IBM
> could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size of the dollar
> bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it could be stored in a
> mechanical cash register is miraculously the Right Thing when it comes to
> reading monospaced text on a screen?  I think that's asking a bit much of
> ol' man Coincidence.

I find 120x30 (the Windows 10 default) works a bit better, though I still 
consider 80x24/25 the "canonical" terminal size - because it's about the 
width of text on a printout (6.5" x 12 cpi = 78 characters).

-uso.