I've been a bit immersed in pre-Fortran-77 (so FORTRAN-IV and FORTRAN-66). It was an interesting time: FORTRAN was the most standard language, so people used it for things like compilers. An example I have is Motorola's 6800 assembler, which was delivered as a tape for various common machines of the day:

http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/cross-asse...

But this was before FORTRAN had strings.. or even bit-wise operators.. But you could read an input line into an array of integers. Then to read each character from this array, you used integer multiplication and division to perform shifting and masking. Although in this version, I can see calls to assembly language helper functions.

Note the Hollerith constants.. (no strings).