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: Hediedattheconsole
Ofhungerandthirst. Nextdayhewasburied, Facedown,9-edgefirst. 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.

