I love reading technology history because it explains two powerful things: why a tool was born , and why people eventually moved on . Data formats tell this story perfectly. None of them were random. Each one answered a real pain of its era then later met new pressures: bigger scale, faster systems, better developer experience, lower cost. So instead of treating XML, JSON, and others like a feature checklist, let’s read them like chapters in a long engineering story. 1960s...