Most of the programs I've seen do what the author calls "Initialization by Instruction" anyway. Bootstrapping and initialization are notoriously tricky to do in hardware, and a lot of us have been bit by this before. Besides, even a compliant power supply (i.e. one that normally meets the electrical requirements, which aren't all that strenuous, to be honest...) can end up being operated in a non-compliant environment.

The cool thing about these things is that most of them are 99% similar, which has helped with endurance more than anything else. It's a weird architecture, yes, but you can often replace a thirty year-old LCD with a brand new one and it'll work, often without any firmware adjustment. That is hard to beat (and, besides, there's hardly any reason to beat it).

For me it somehow shows a good point: Your architecture can be super weird and clusterfucked, but if it just works, people will use it neverthelesss.

I mean, you don't have to care about the architecture at all. You just throw some simple bits and characters at the screen and it displays that for you. I think the simplicity of that got these displays to the point where they are now

yes they are dinosaurs of a superior breed, TFT displays are something else too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film-transistor_liquid-cr...

a neat thing about these LCDs is that there is a display buffer that holds the alphanumeric, but no need for the buffer to write to the display. the buffer can be written to and read from as if its memory [bcz it is!]