Also it would be amusing to consider 2600 meetings a "user's group for Ma Bell". I did not participate until post-divestiture (84 or so)

I was there back in the day and the article missed the important meeting reasons of generally unofficial mass software piracy and games and especially the combination of both.

We gamed together a LONG time before lan parties.

Also the most important feature of corporate marketing department contact was a nice food budget for meetings. Attendance always increases with pizza and donuts.

IBM Selectric Electric Typewriter left margin symbol indicator thingy on the little carriage position indicator plate between the keys and the platen of the typewriter. Most high schools had rows of these typewriters in a classroom to teach touch typing until at least the 90s when they were displaced by PC software. I don't think high schools teach typing anymore, would not work well on iPads.

I was there in the 80s, and I remember this character being used margin/tab displaying purposes in at least one word processor program. It seems an obvious use, IBM literally used that symbol for that purpose on their typewriters. Does anyone else remember the name of the word processor program?

I will toss out the idea that the moderns are simpler and more orthogonal to teach than the retros.

For example Classic Retro Motorola had an interesting register model where 8 bit registers A and B are ALSO simultaneously 16 bit register D, found on my favorite 6809 but also the 68hc11 microcontroller. This is mystifying to new programmers (so I wrote to register A which messed up register D what?)

The craziest thing about RISC-V register model is if you try to save a value to register x0 you will be very unhappy when you read zeros from x0 (because x0 is an infinite source of zeros on RV32I ...)

Likewise things get weird on retro CPUs where certain adds and moves can be written in assembly but can't be assembled by the assembler. I distinctly recall a test question where some new-at-the-time chip example was asking if you can inc its stack pointer or add hex 1 to its stack pointer or just pop it. It depends on the chip of course but generally the newer the chip the more generic its registers and rules.

I was there back in the old days, and the example in the interview of "There are a number of applications where multitasking on a single user system could come in very handy. Here’s an example." were very artificial marketing driven.

In the 80s I would do things like file copy and printing to a serial port-attached printer in the background and I/O was bulletproof I don't recall ever having a problem on Level 1. It was slow and the floppy controller halted the computer severely but it never lost data or crashed, very nice.

On Level 2 I used Multi-Vue to run various combinations of editor, compiler, and executable in windows.

The main problem I had with OS-9 Level II and the dev system and Multivue is the complete software pack from Radio Shack was about $250... to run on a computer with a list price of $200... These were also the days when your CRT monitor and your hard drive (if you had one) typically cost 2x what your computer cost.

Another interesting quote from the interview was regarding a million cocos sold and only 100K disk drives sold by RS ... Note the base coco was $200 and for all practical purposes only available from RS, whereas the RS disk addon package was $300, a hundred dollars more than the base computer, and in comparison Rainbow/Hot Coco magazines were full of ads for cheaper floppy packages, like $225 to $250 price range.

Its interesting looking at old PDFs of Rainbow from the late 80s, I never noticed it at the time but 1/3 of the ads were for IBM/PC/XT compatible hardware, which seems weird for a "coco" magazine.

To my enormous surprise, forty-plus years later triple period now means something like recursive wildcard subdirectory in the Go language

# lists your standard library packages and workspace packages

go list ...

# Builds just your workspace as opposed to "go build ..." which is much more exciting, don't do that

go build ./...

I am rather jealous of the M68K as on a 6809 in the 80s running OS-9 Level 1 we were somehow ALWAYS out of both floppy disk space and memory.