Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Introduction (one page)
To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and what wehave today: the original was probably entered on cards commonly knownat the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate) andprobably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A single card could hold 80characters (hence 80 characters is an accepted standard for so manycomputer margins), and the entire original edition we received in allcaps was over 800,000 chars in length, including line enumeration,symbols for caps and the punctuation marks, etc., since they were notavailable keyboard characters at the time (probably the keyboardsoperated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to typeslowly for the keyboard to keep up).
Paradise Lost