Greetings. A couple of days ago someone noted to me that the 140 character limit of Twitter messages ("tweets") wasn't much longer than the capacity of old IBM punch cards (80 characters). This is true, and there's a somewhat delightful irony in the fact that after so many decades of pushing for ever more data capacity, we've found ourselves speeding forward into the past in terms of highly constrained individual messages.

But wait a minute ... Haven't I seen ...? Yes, I remember now. It's in my ancient computing history collection somewhere. Where can it be?

Lessee now. Is it under the old 300 bps acoustic modem? No. Behind the ancient ARPANET Resources handbook? Not there either. What about wedged in near the roll of punched paper tape with a Star Trek game written in BASIC?

AH! Success. Found it! An original, unused, physical, 140 character Twitter Tweet! To think, it all started with this -- though you'd have to be pretty careful trying to get this baby into an IBM 082 sorter, and this format was only useful for EBCDIC tweets, of course.

But here it is.

Twitter: Do Not Bend, Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate!

--Lauren--