'Back in the day' regular formats were a pretty good way of maintaining system performance. They still are really but computers being an order of magnitude overpowered for all the tasks 90% of users do makes it less relevant. You'd be surprised how easy it is to memorize long series of digits when you enter them a few times. For instance FCKGW. Who was the president in 2001? You'll now literally never forget those 5 letters.