eighty-column mind

[IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called The Last Bug, the climactic lines of which are as follows:

He died at the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first.

The eighty-column mind was thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. This only began to change in the mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself after the triumph of the {killer micro}. See {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {code grinder}. A copy of The Last Bug lives on the the GNU site at http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.

---