IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display

Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by lysace on Sunday March 15, 2026 @02:14PM (#47390130)

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.

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

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Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by rasz on Sunday March 15, 2026 @05:00PM (#47391851)

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

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Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by lysace on Sunday March 15, 2026 @05:11PM (#47391968)

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

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Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by rbanffy on Monday March 16, 2026 @04:10AM (#47396280)

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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