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Typewriters and dot matrix printers were monospace. It had nothing to do with lining code up.

When I attended university in the mid-1990s, and again in mid-2000s, we were required to hand in papers using monospace font, black ink, with a specific point size and margins.

It kept everything looking consistent with typewriters (which some people still used through the 1990s), but also kept people from using distracting or illegible fonts, or trying to work around page or word limits by using different fonts.




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