If you enable the "View Right Margin" in your IDE of choice, it is likely that it will default to 80 characters. I tend to change it to 120 for no reason other than it was the standard at a company I was with a few years back, and no other company has told me to do it differently.
My question is, are there any studies that actually show 80 characters to be the optimal maximum width for code readability, or is this value just a "that's the way it's always been" and no one really knows why it is that way? And, should the width of a line of code be part of your coding standard?
Answer
Actually, the 80-column thing long precedes DOS. It comes from card punches, which were 80-column devices.
And to kind of answer the OP's question, one "study" has been going on for about 600 years now - the printed book. These have evolved over the centuries, with readbility foremost in mind, to the position we are at now where the average line length for text is around 60 characters. So for readability, go for narrower margins.