Or were you advocating breaking the 80 chars per line restriction, but not the fixed-width font restriction?
It's alot like syntax highlighting: people will lose their minds if you suggest that it's even possible to live without it, but the fact that they are able to read their shell input line, their less/vim :-line, their google input line when they use quotes/minus/etc, their books with code in them, ..., suggests that their complaint is not based on a _need_ for highlighting but on an expectation for it. It's the only way to explain why it's apparently necessary in one program and completely unneeded in all others.
Fixed-width fonts are like that.
Obviously it came from the 80x25 character mode displays of old CRT monitors. The IBM PC had an 80x25 monochrome display, but it was just mimicking older CRTs from the '70s.
Where did those displays get their dimensions: usually 80x25, sometimes 80x24?
It can't be punched cards. There's nothing particularly special about a deck of 25 cards vs. 21 or 29 or whatever.
It isn't the Teletype machines we used back in the day. Those use a continuous roll of paper.
In fact the first time I saw someone using a "glass teletype" at Tymshare where we all coded on Teletypes, I wondered what you would do when something scrolled off the top of the 25 line screen. Teletypes were noisy, but the paper coming out the top gave you an infinite scrollback buffer!
So why 25 lines?
I think it came from the standard coding forms used for FORTRAN and other languages in the '50s:
http://www.atkielski.com/PDF/data/fortran.pdf
(BTW if you want an authentic FORTRAN Coding Form of your own, that PDF prints beautifully on 8.5 x 14 legal-size paper.)
There you have it: six groups of three lines each, 24 lines on your coding form. So an 80x24 display was a perfect match for a standard coding form.
Add a status line at the bottom of the CRT and you have your 80x25 terminal.
-dB
The 80 width "limit" has survived to the extent it has not just because of tradition and compatibility, but also because it fits well within the range of what is most comfortable for most people.
Add to that the desire to ensure fixed-formatted text like code will be readable also on other peoples screens, and it becomes relatively irrelevant if you can fit 200 character lines on your screen and have eyesight that makes that comfortable even when using smaller screens, and don't mind moving your head all over the place.
Additionally, and as others have observed as well, the author (mistakenly, in my opinion) assumes that 80 columns was imposed by the punchcard rather than the punchcard reflected an approximation of readable line length. That this line length has an innate readability can be confirmed with this experiment: take a book off of the bookshelf, open to a random page and input a random line of text in your fixed-width text editor. Hardcover or paperback, small font or large, old book or new, you will find that the line is almost always less than 80 columns -- and often surprisingly close. One can quibble about the exact number, but it is clear that there is an innate connection between line length and readability -- and that enforcing that line length is an easy way of enforcing minimum standards of readability.
Also, when I was coding in PascalVS at the University of Pangaea, I distinctly recall becoming incensed one day over the fact that, while the Hollerith card provided 80 columns, the PascalVS compiler stopped reading earlier than that--maybe it only accepted 72 characters per line. That was irritating. And costly--we had to provide our own cards, and on a student budget, they weren't cheap!
Why is more always considered better?
Why? Because (and here, we finally get to the real answer),
that's how wide a Roman chariot needed to be, in order to
accommodate the width of the war horses pulling it. So, in
some sense, the width of cars is not only an artifact of
the way that things had always been, but is also an
extension of the tyranny of Caesar. Remember that the next
time you go pick up some groceries.
This item is one that, although wrong in many of its details,
isn't completely false in an overall sense and is perhaps more
fairly labeled as "Partly true, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons."http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2007/11/07/and-the-longest-jre...
Even the plain, flat HTML files had to be less than 80 chars per line.
Examples here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Example_code