Seeking: IBM Coding Forms

When terminals finally hit the big time (early 1970s), there was still a huge installed base of card technology out there. Disks were very expensive, and disk packs were often in very short supply. It took until the late 1970s for cards to finally fall. During the transition, it only made sense to make the terminal standard adhere to the card standard. For example, imagine if terminals were standardized to 64 columns - what do you do with all the data entry jobs and databases that use columns 65 and up? Modify them? Programmers cost money. Or if terminals had 100 columns - the memory chips inside the tubes were damn expensive, and all those bits for the extra columns would not get used much. An extra couple hundred bucks times hundreds of terminals adds up, and looks really bad when they are not used. -- Will