Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com