This post is another example of why I like zig so much. It seems to get people talking about performance in a way which helps them learn how things work below today’s heavily abstracted veneer
I miss Openboot firmware that was on SunOS servers and workstations. It was IIRC mostly written in FORTH and we could write forth snippets at the serial console to make mods / query the pre boot environment. I also found the SGI boot firmware similarly functional. Both allowed changing boot settings and allowed to boot from network without any trouble at all. Graphical BIOS that came with the x86 systems was such a downgrade for us especially since you could not interact over serial/remotely with a simple terminal connection. IMHO
With respect to end of sentence spaces. I'm an "old" and learned on typewriters and type two spaces is etched into my muscle memory and my brain. It wasn't until 2016 that while working collaboratively on a large google doc (which was occasionally brought into Word by others) that I was made aware that two spaces were no longer the norm.
It was like an editing PVP game where these would be fixed in near real-time by others in the document we were working on :-)
Yes the web text today removes these today but I still prefer reading text in the old RFC document style where it's not only fixed width fonts, but also right and left column justified. In emacs this can be done by selecting a region and doing a C-u ESC q
I liked programming the m68k cpus. They were also the CPU used in my computer science department curricula for assembly language programming classes.
At school we had lots of Sun{2,3,4}, Apollo, HP, Mac, and NeXT computers which we could practice on. Kinda saw the writing on the wall when we got a 6 CPU i386 sequent symmetry system and then SPARC, MIPS RISC, and PowerPC while nothing really from Motorola. I never enjoyed programming x86 cpus after being self taught on 6502 and then m68k systems :-)
I still have an ATARI Mega ST and a Sun 2 at home for sentimental reasons only.