If I had a time machine they would be high on the list of people to visit and give a stern talking to. Problem is that this goes back a long ways, e.g. back to

If I had a time machine they would be high on the list of people to visit and give a stern talking to. Problem is that this goes back a long ways, e.g. back to the days of 36 bit computers. Why 36 bits? Because that was just enough to encode 10 decimal digits, the standard back then for scientific computation. Back then as in the days before core memory was used, so not much main memory either, and it was still expensive and painful after core was developed. So with that limited a budget, 6 bit character systems were common, that's enough to get things done and you can fit 6 in a word. One reason mainline Lisp doesn't use '?' in function names, why old languages like it and FORTRAN are or were case insensitive.