Many of the accidental decisions of the 70’s and 80’s ended up becoming de facto standards, and then actual standards, and then requirements in purchases, and t

Many of the accidental decisions of the 70’s and 80’s ended up becoming de facto standards, and then actual standards, and then requirements in purchases, and then table stakes for market entry. Why must bytes have 8 bits, why do we count time as seconds since 1970, why must text be encoded as unicode code points, etc... There is now such strong external pressure on projects to conform to these table stakes that I think the only thing that will overturn these decisions at this point is the singularity.