Matrices were fine if your data mapped to 2 numeric dimensions snugly, but otherwise waste a ton of space. Space was the main constraint here. With strings, yo

Matrices were fine if your data mapped to 2 numeric dimensions snugly, but otherwise waste a ton of space. Space was the main constraint here. With strings, you could get very close to base256 encoding, because you could store any valid token as a single byte, and there were almost 256 tokens. E.g. SIN, COS, TAN are all single tokens. Whereas matrices take up 9 bytes per element. A lot of games used bitmaps to store sprites or level data, so as long as you avoided a few forbidden patterns, you could encode 8 pixels per token which was pretty cool.