I am sure that I have re-read many more books than I have failed to read

For a more general purpose online learning platform Moodle is certainly worth looking into. I haven't used it in anger for a few years now but it appears to be active.

Waterloo Fortran IV - now THAT is an obscure reference. Pretty sure that I only ever coded a couple of programs in WATFIV

Commercial airliners are pretty close to being robotic already of course

Remember going to the class? I didn't go.
My second year Math exams were very interesting
Full of ideas and concepts I had never come across before
Whoops

Learning to programme should be completely trivial if you've got any talent.
Learning a whole eco-system of development tools which is what you'd need to do to hold down a serious job is a much bigger task of course.
A decent CS degree from a good school won't teach you how to code - they'll assume you know that pretty much as an entry requirement

He's probably first level support for some package

Correct

The default position will be that nothing and I mean nothing in the corporate domain will be able to open a TCP connection to anything in the SCADA domain.

and the guys in charge of this will take it all the way to senior management if you even look like you are thinking of breaking this rule.

and you'll have to sign some serious career limiting documents before the guys in suits will sanction this.

or at least that's how it's been at place I have worked where they have SCADA networks and my specialist topic is data integration so I tend to bump into these issues fairly often

SCADA networks are usually on a completely separate domain from the corporate network. It'll be behind two sets of firewalls controlled by anal retentive engineers

No survival of the fittest is actually survival of the fittest gene. Read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene - nothing new here that hasn't been written up in pop science for 30 years as far as I can tell