Item — HN Reader

Maybe worth mentioning is also the alternatives to 80 x 24: One of the first "glass" terminals were the Uniscope series by Univac, and these featured originally 64 characters in 16 rows for (wonder of wonders) 1024 characters total, or 12 rows of 80 characters (the punched card dimensions, again) for 960 characters total.

(The series started in 1964 and later models also featured 80 x 24 character screens.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniscope

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264631...

2 comments

What's really cool in the Uniscope is that it's a vector display rather than a raster one. Each character has, IIRC, 6 vectors.

I'll try to dig deeper into the specifics, because this might be an answer to a long-standing unanswered question at https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41048/are-there-an...

Quite interesting is the apparently bit-mapped dark-on-light ("paper green"?) monitor shown in that thread ("CMC DSKY And State Buffer Monitor"). Also interesting to see these various technologies side by side.

NASA surely must be a wild place - I wish I could work there. Must have been even wilder in the 60's and 70's with all that bleeding edge technology.

64×16 are also the standard dimensions for a Forth “block” (record in a record-based file, basically, also buffer in a buffer pool used to read and write said files and screenful in a screen editor for them). Probably unrelated, as there aren’t many reasonable power-of-two screen sizes, but still curious.

Per Elizabeth Rather, "the block size was chosen as a convenient standard across disks whose sector sizes vary". Which I suspect means simply that, when the I/O facilities were added, 1024 was the largest sector size among the target platforms, and all others had smaller sizes multiples of which added up to 1024.