Comment by Pinus

Comment by Pinus 16 hours ago

6 replies

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to handle all those bizarre systems. And I am sure that there is someone on HN who actually used one of those servers...

tiborsaas 15 hours ago

Thanks, I really expected a tale from the 70's, but did not see punch cards coming :)

  • jibal 15 hours ago

    The influence of 80 column punch cards remains pervasive.