Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

A lot of industrial design is based on inheritance. The nitrocellulose filmstock was nominal 40mm, after cutting and sprockets it was 35. cut it in half you have 16mm single sprocket. Original manufacture was 80 wide cut in half so undo that and you get 70mm. run the film sideways, you now have 700 high for IMAX dimensions. Why was nitrocellulose film stock coming in 80mm wide strips? Ask somebody who knows what George Eastman was doing at the time... My guess is the tank emitted 100mm but the edges were crinkly, and 80mm was what he got after slicing ragged margins. The rest is inheritance down the stack working on 1/2 and 1/4 sizing consequences. IBM was business machines. tabulators. The sheet stock it used for things in business was defined by what it could source coming in, reliably. The US census used hollerith cards, this is probably why the fed reserve used hollerith cards. (My G/F got a 1978 tax cheque refund from a camp school in the midwest on a hollerith-card-cheque, the last time I saw one in anger outside of the computer labs where we were still using them in anger, very anger) the Banks first atm's used card stock for receipts. they were mini-hollerith. I imagine because they understood how to do alignment from a cut corner, and had machinery which worked. I was told that fmt/72 is a post-hoc rationalisation to allow for 4-5 levels of indentation in >>>quoting. I think this is a post-hoc rationalisation of a prompter hoc reality. If you go back into teletype deep history, I bet you find 40/60/72 was coming out of some combination of fixed-width typeface, mechanics, and paper stock sizes available in the supply chain. (Mike Lesk told me the TBL offset in the T/ROFF box drawing was because of a highly specific throwback effect in the printer at Bell. The code was adjusted to deal with this, and the rest of us had to wear the top and bottom lines being misplaced without a patch to the code. This kind of thing, its classic "because we could, and because it works" decision logic) On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 10:17 AM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: