The Origins of 132

The Origins of 132

By Gary Schultz, Senior Support Programmer

If you’re a Programmer, chances are you’ve come across the number 132 whether you’re running into limitations in Print Control, entering it in PF commands, or having your HTML output cut off. Why 132? What’s the significance of that number? Have you ever found yourself wondering where the number 132 came from? My curiosity was piqued so I took a trip to the World Wide Web. As it turns out, we can look to our friends at IBM for a possible answer.

You may or may not know that Episys runs on the IBM Power System with AIX. In the early days of mainframe line printing, the maximum number of characters that could fit on one line of a report coming from IBM printers was 132.  Who remembers this???!

I don’t because I’m 20 or 30 years old ☺, but some of you might remember those infinite stacks of green bar/zebra paper. The 14×11 size sheets could hold 132 characters per line. It seems that this number was adopted and built into the core in different ways, some more logical than others. The functionality that cuts off HTML output at 132 characters seems to simply be the chosen convention and not a strict limitation based on output size. The developers probably just decided it was a good number to use. But you can see the need for it in the output of Print Control as the display can only show that many characters.

So you see, the number 132 isn’t necessarily a randomly chosen number that the developers thought would be nice to use, but rather a significant number that they decided to implement in sometimes random but mostly logical ways. Now I’m heading up to Larry’s office to ask him about punch cards. ☺

.