Solid ground-plane vs Hatched ground-plane
As others said, it's mostly because it was easier to manufacture than solid layers for various reasons.

They also can be used in certain situations where you need controlled impedance on a very thin board.  The traces width needed to get 'normal' impedances on such a thin board would be ridiculously narrow but the cross hatching changes the impedance characteristics on adjacent layers to allow wider traces for a given impedance.  

If for some reason you need to do this, you can only route controlled impedance traces at 45 deg to the hatch pattern.  This approach greatly increases mutual inductance between signals and consequently, cross-talk.  Also note that this only works when the size of the hatch is much less than the length of the signal's rise time, this normally correlates to the frequency of the digital signals in question.  As such, as frequency increases you reach a point where the hatch pattern would have to be so tightly spaced that you lose any benefit vs a solid plane.

In summary: Never use a cross hatched ground plane, unless you're stuck in some really weird situation.  Modern PCB construction and assembly techniques no longer require it.