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Comment by lysace | Hacker News Reader

No idea if this was a factor, but 80x25 on the IBM PC allows for showing 80x24 plus that extra line of function key labels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#/media/File%3AIBM_Ca... (IBM BASIC screenshot)

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Imagine when edit.com came out and QBASIC used it for the editor. You lost two more lines of valuable code space!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS_Editor#/media/File%3AMS...

You know, this is funny because QBasic did not use EDIT.COM. Instead, QBasic was the editor and EDIT.COM was a simple program that called "QBASIC /EDIT" :-)

It was basically the same thing. That's my point.

I recently went back to my 1993 Turbo Pascal code (mostly 2D VGA and Sound Blaster game engine experiments) on period correct hardware.

I was surprised by how claustrophobic it felt to only see 21 lines of code in e.g. Turbo Pascal 7.0. Still didn’t like the squashed 80x43 mode.

https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c38a28c3-84c3-ba28-1011-c3...

Then I remembered how larger displays and xterm felt like such a liberation a few years later.

Power users had superEGA with 132 column 40/43/44/60/66 row modes.

I think mostly just Lotus 1-2-3 (the standard textmode spreadsheet application of the time) supported that?

Shorter displays end up making programs more modular with shorter functions.

I always encourage my fellow Python developers to stick to 80 columns for readability.

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