Yes, FORTRAN (introduced in 1957) was originally written on 80-column punch cards:

Before the development of disk files, text editors and terminals, programs were most often entered on a keypunch keyboard onto 80 column punched cards, one line to a card. The resulting deck of cards would be fed into a card reader to be compiled....
Originally Fortran programs were written in a fixed column format.... the card was divided into four fields. Columns 1 to 5 were the label field: a sequence of digits here was taken as a label for the purpose of a GOTO or a FORMAT reference in a WRITE or READ statement. Column 6 was a continuation field: a non-blank character here caused the card to be taken as a continuation of the statement on the previous card. Columns 7 to 72 served as the statement field. Columns 73 to 80 were ignored, so they could be used for identification information.
— Wikipedia, “Fortran”

So,

A legacy of the 80 column punched card format is that a display of 80 characters per row was a common choice in the design of character-based terminals.
— Wikipedia, “Punched_card”

See also Wikipedia, “Characters per line”.

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re^3: increase default code-len window by Athanasius
in thread increase default code-len window by perl-diddler

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