Reminds me of when I first encountered the extraordinarily compressed 12 bit "words" in a ARINC717 data stream, where they're conserving bits that are written as-is, serially. Like three decades of computing passed it by. If something has four distinct values, it gets two bits. Then, right on top of that: is it a syncro response curve? Output the binary for the curve function. On and on, for thousands of "words", all jammed together. I used to imagine being a future researcher, trying to decode these big blocks of undifferentiated binary, the amount of legwork I'd have to accomplish to get just a few layers deep.