Tabs -vs- Spaces: Tabs should have won.

[Dave Angel]

On 01/-10/-28163 02:59 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Tim Chase wrote:
>
>> On 07/17/2011 08:01 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> Roy Smith wrote:
>>>> We don't have that problem any more.  It truly boggles my
>>>> mind that we're still churning out people with 80 column
>>>> minds.  I'm willing to entertain arguments about readability
>>>> of long lines, but the idea that there's something magic
>>>> about 80 columns is hogwash.
>>> I agree! Which is why I set my line width to 78 columns.
>> Bah, when I started programming
>> on the Apple ][+, we had no
>> lower-case and a 40-column limit
>> on the TV display.
>> But you try and tell the young
>> people today that...
>> and they won't believe ya'.
> 40 columns? Luxury! My first computer was a Hewlett Packard 28S handheld
> programmable calculator, with 22 columns[1] and 32 entire kilobytes of
> memory!
>
> (I don't include my previous programmable calculator, a Casio, or was it a
> Canon, as the programming language included wasn't Turing Complete.)
>
>
>
> [1] I think it was 22 columns -- that's what my HP 48GX has, and I'm sure
> the 28S screen was no larger.
>
My first programmable calculator had 1.5k of RAM, display was 13 digits 
wide, and it took an optional 2k of PROM via a plugin socket on top.  I 
wrote a commercially sold navigation program for that calculator.  The 
program was used on ships in 1974 and later.  Later I squeezed the code 
a bit and made room for a dead reckoning program and great circle 
calculator.

I didn't write a cross assembler for it till after this project was 
finished.  That assembler ran on a machine with 64 column display.

DaveA