Amazed the computer development people had not thought of that,
They had. Calculating up to +/-128 requires 8-bit computing, calculating up to 2000 requires 16-bit computing. Takes a lot more memory, time, cost etc (at the time) I started programming at school in 1977 with 4k of memory, much of which was taken up by the operating system. If you wanted to play a game, you had to write the program first!
What was amazing was that managers refused to start looking at the problem in around 1990-ish, on cost grounds.The programmers had told them in good time.
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