On the most popular accounting system I had 3k to work with, so every bit counted.

So this caught my eye;

I didn't hate compiling, but working at the low system level in assembly language felt like black magic.

I was just a student. I loved the assembly language class and got an A+, but the professor's favorite student got a D. The guy was visionary. He took the class because that was the easiest way to get time on a computer where he would be allowed to program in assembly (PDP 11, BTW).

We were doing obvious things, like measurements that used all 8 bits unlike that stupid boolean. I suppose graphical interfaces existed in the Xerox Parc, but I had never seen one. This guy was doing things like turning his cursor into a sailboat. By the end of the semester, he had animated a smoothly rotating 3D ring in space.

If I had had just a tiny bit of vision into the future of computers, I probably would have seen that and stayed as a computer science major instead of becoming a historian. Unfortunately, I was a clueless and depressed 19 or 20 year old with no vision or insight at all.

I have often wondered what became of that guy

There wasn't a whole lot of (Burroughs proprietary) code to learn in those days. The cross-reference booklet was pocket-size and 25-ish pages.