Hollerith encoding

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (December 2007)

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.