I read expecting to see something really alien. But it doesn't strike me as alien so much ... just low-level. You have to know the format of the bytes that were written to disk, which is pretty rare these days outside of systems programming (and mainframes I guess).
You don't have to know, and many working on Manframes don't. No-one outside the Mainframe should need to know, unless you get the stupid "oh, but they refuse to change the program" for a data-transfer (read, "we signed-off on it before we knew what we were doing"). There's 256 bit-patterns to a byte. It is not rocket surgery.
