I'm very curious about why. In 8-space tab sizes, you have to very, very carefully think about what you're fitting on that 80-col line after having in most cases, already removed 10% of your column space. A lot of C resulted in single character variable names and abbreviations that sacrificed immediate readability, but with domain knowledge that gets resolved with time.

On the flip side of things, you have developers who universally write 240+ col lines in HTML and don't know what a punched card is.