My old man started his tech work on hot rods, then mechanical typewriters, calculators, eventually continuing into mainframe electronics and nearly followed all the transitions up to today’s AI.
The number of times I’ve scratched my head at a problem and he had a clear understanding of where the logic broke… based on a historical decision that could not physically be undone.
They come from Lapack, the standard linear algebra foundation library, which is written in Fortran 77. That library was first written in 1992, when the Fortran 90 standard was still new and not supported everywhere, so they stuck with the earlier version. Lapack has become the standard library for dense non-parallel linear algebra; it is still maintained and updated, but the basic math algorithms haven't changed much, so there was no need to replace it entirely. Today there are also processor-specific libraries like MKL or Apple Accelerate, but they still all follow the same Lapack API.
When Fortran-77 was standardized, they decided to keep function names at most 6 letter long, to "ensure portability". I.e., they wanted to support certain compilers and architectures that were already considered old in 1977.
TL;DR: if you can't read easily those flame graphs today, it's because of backward compatibility with certain mainframes that probably date back to the late 1960s.
Not one character, but two: Carriage Return and Line Feed. Literally the action of moving the printer back to the beginning of the line and then the action of making the sheet of paper go "up" by one line.
I'd probably consider using IBM if it wasn't so goddamn weird and expensive. I suppose all that backward compatibility does have its downsides. Windows feels a bit weird in some places too, but at the same time it didn't start out life as a typewriter.
Windows 11 still has some dialogs that haven't been touched (and they can't ever be, in order to prevent backward compatibility breakage) since Windows 3.1: https://www.windowsonwindows.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44