I encountered Hollerith constants in an ancient Fortran codebase I worked on and was thrilled to see folks were doing clever stuff with strings in the 60s. I w

I encountered Hollerith constants in an ancient Fortran codebase I worked on and was thrilled to see folks were doing clever stuff with strings in the 60s. I wonder how much time was wasted in early computing (maybe not wasted really) because of the fear of incompatibility that is getting smaller and smaller as computing platforms coalesce into standardized-ish things. Watching the M1 roll out and how it doesn't seem to care much that x86 is a thing and gets along with its life has been fascinating.