On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Sellam Ismail wrote:
On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
The physical dimensions of the punched cards were
chosen to match dollar
bills, so that the processing hardware could make use of existing
subassemblies. I don't know why that particular hole to hole spacing was
chosen, but that combined with the size of the cards resulted in 80
column.
Are you sure? A punch card is a bit larger than a dollar bill.
I'm looking at an E-series bill (pre-'60) and although I haven't seen
a punchcard in a while, I think they're darn close.
Doc