ABSTRACT
In the early days of computing, formatting data was pretty much up to the idiosyncrasies of individual programmers. If you wanted to be able to plot the boundary of a country, then you might throw the data into a file as line after line of data, each line containing a pairs of coordinates. The file would contain numbers, just numbers. As likely as not, the coordinate pairs would be jammed up against one another. Clarity didn’t matter because the data were set up for just one program to read and you told your program what the exact format was. If it ever occurred to you that others might one day want to use that data, then you just shrugged your shoulders and said “Hey, that’s ok. If they need to know what the format is, then just come and ask me.”
