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).
interesting, "beat it" was the development name for the drumbeat project, and the lable of the main routine in the original source code. Is it circumstantial that you chose "beat it" in your comment or is there an inside knowledge?
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
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!]
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).