Hollerith encoding

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Hollerith encoding was a standard for punch cards used in early computers. Until the early 1980's, the use of these punch cards was a common form of computer input.

These punch cards were 80 columns by 12 rows in size, and in the Hollerith encoding scheme, had one BCD character^[1] per column.
An artifact of this early "standard" is that most character-based terminals used an 80-column by 24-row size. Even now, the default size for character interfaces remains set at 80 columns.

References

1. ^ Doug Jones's punched card codes