Disclaimer: I've been doing this for all of ~5 years so I have no experience with older terminal-style programming.
I would argue that that's a mark against the former, but if you're using languages like them it's silly to try and fit everything into 80 characters. You still need a strict rule, btw: sooner or later some jackass will be putting in 200+ if you're not careful, which is insane in any language because it's utterly unreadable.
It has to do with how the eye physically moves: you want a given block of logic to be as square as possible, so moving from one portion of it to another, on average, minimizes the amount of distance your eye has to travel.
The important bit for me seems to be that the stuff you have to read and understand should be in the <80 area.