I'm fascinated by the details of the evolution of technology. I've been working my way through Marcin Wichary's excellent book Shift Happens, which is a history of keyboards from the first typewriters to smartphone keyboards. The book is over a thousand pages of well-written prose and beautiful photography.
In it, Wichary mentions that typewriters averaged 60-80 characters of monospace text to a page. That number caught my attention, because terminal windows for command line interfaces like Bash also default to 80 characters wide. The physical terminals they replaced were 80 characters wide, because the most popular IBM punch card was 80 characters wide, because you could type 80 characters to a page.!
If we'd settled on a different standard page size, maybe that number would have been different, but that's why it's 80 and not 100 or 64 or some other number that might make more sense if you were designing from scratch.
We reach for the tools that are at hand, and those define how we solve problems. Even when we advance beyond the physical limitations of our tools, those old limits define what we're used to, what "feels right."
And I think that's neat.
! History is always fuzzy, so it's probably not quite as straightforward a connection as that, but it's definitely connected.
