I just carry a small Anker USB-C hub in my laptop case -- has two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an SD card reader. I must say, though, I've used it less than I expected to when I got it.
You're absolutely right that social skills can be learned. But note that they can be massively harder for some people to learn than others. Social skills that come almost automatically to your average person can be a lot of a work for someone with Asperger's to learn, for instance.
I'd simply guess he'd never heard of it -- it was pretty obscure in the early 1970s. It might have been less accessible to beginners, but Forth was the perfect language for those early microcomputers. I loved programming in it on my Commodore 64.