Agree. I think most software of the era did that kind of thing. Most of it wasn’t popular enough and/or got abandoned soon enough for ‘the internet’ to notice,

Agree. I think most software of the era did that kind of thing. Most of it wasn’t popular enough and/or got abandoned soon enough for ‘the internet’ to notice, though. If your software runs in 256kB, writing to a floppy disk, you pack your data structures, use bit fields where possible, and you’re not going to waste CPU time, RAM and disk space to write a format that’s easy to understand and extend. (Of course, they extended it, anyways, as everybody would)