from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
eighty-column mind
n.
[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.
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
eighty-column mind
<abuse> The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the
transition from {punched card} to {paper 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 is thought by most {hackers} to
dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking.
See {fear and loathing}, {card walloper}.
[{Jargon File}]
(1996-08-16)