the unix morons, think that the world should truncate lines just like
their incompetent operating system silently truncate lines (and it
still DOES, folks! e.g. ps, tar, tcsh.) Around 1998 when i was using
Outlook Express or Eudora before that, i remember i can set lines to
not hard-wrap, and i did.
The telephone did not evolve, other than touch tone dialing. It took
cellphones to let people start over several times to get any changes.
Communications are slow to evolve because they require both ends to
change. This is almost impossible to accomplish politically.
This is why email and newsgroups will have to die and be replaced with
something entirely new that lets you transmit richer content, prevents
spam, verifies authorship, tracks attributions, does instant delivery
notification etc.
The problem is it will be very difficult for anything no matter how
cheap or technologically brilliant to get a foothold against the quite
wonderful entrenched distributed delivery of newsgroups.
Perhaps at some point will at least allow program listing that don't
wrap inappropriately, and HTML for displaying tables.
