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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 06:12:54 +0100
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On 04.03.2025 04:17, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:23:52 -0800, Keith Thompson wrote:
> 
>> IBM developed 80-column cards, with the same overall size, in the late
>> 1920s.  Apparently 80 just happened to be the number of rectangular
>> holes that could reasonably be accommodated (and it's a nice round
>> number).  And 80-column video terminals were baed on card sizes (though
>> I think some earlier terminals had 40 columns).
> 
> Where did 132-column printers come from?

From IBM ? - Or S&H ?

Historically there were various types of printers developed that were
supporting various number of characters per line. Some printer types,
e.g. from IBM, especially the chain-printers that were common in IT,
supported 132 characters. - My guess would be that because of IBM's
dominance in IT back these days made that a not uncommon choice. Once
any (company-)standard is in the world other vendors orient on that.
(There have also been other chain-printers with 100 characters/line.
And other printer types with yet more variance in characters/line.)

Such chain-printer standard might later have influenced also terminals
like the VT100 with its 80/132 display modes. (Here we have to also
consider the display character masks; it must somehow evenly fit into
the sizes and be still readable.)

Other factors in printing technology can probably be derived from
common paper sizes and the colonial, inch-based units; standards like
printers printing 10 characters per inch, or fonts measured in dots per
inch. (I'd think quite some quasi-arbitrary numbers can be derived.)

WRT chain-printers; the paper width is quite unwieldy for non-IT use.
(I suppose they wanted to not restrict possible data output too much.)
Linearly calculating down the listing-paper size from its format to
Letter format (or DIN A4) will result in values more common for books.

Janis