You could still buy vacuum tubes in the late 70's and early 80's.

'70s and '80s? You can still buy them today. There are even companies (mostly in Russia, other former Warsaw Pact countries, and China) that still make tubes, so you can get brand-new ones for your gear.

That's just the one company I've bought from in the past to fix my old radios; there are others as well that should turn up with a little bit of google-fu.

Since you mentioned the Model T there's one hill on a former highway near me where my grandmother had to put the thing in reverse and go up backwards (reverse on that gearbox is a lower ratio than first).

I'd heard that the reason you had to back Model Ts up steep hills was to keep the fuel tank above the carburetor. If you tried going uphill in the usual manner, the fuel tank would end up below the carburetor. Since the carburetor was gravity-fed (no fuel pump), the engine would conk out as soon as the fuel bowl ran dry.

How much is 1/3 of an ounce?

Two teaspoons. So mych for that example.

Atari is probably the only company that didn't use MS Basic, because they couldn't squeeze it into their limited ROM space.

There was a Microsoft BASIC cartridge for the 8-bit Ataris. It probably wasn't as common as the usual Atari BASIC, but it was out there.

Another prominent non-Microsoft BASIC implementation was Integer BASIC on the Apple II. The II+ and later machines switched to a Microsoft BASIC in order to add floating-point math, though you can load Integer BASIC into RAM if you have at least 64K.

No, in a nutshell, still correct. There is a limit on address space (64K), so memory saved is memory saved, no matter how many bytes.

It couldn't have added much...as others have already said, maybe a few dozen bytes.

The Apple IIe also had 16K of ROM, and that turned out to be enough for a floating-point BASIC interpreter with a tokenizer, a monitor, a mini-assembler, and 80-column display firmware. Pretty much every other computer of the era's BASIC interpreter had a tokenizer; the only one I ever ran across that didn't was a ZX81, and I suspect that one-button BASIC keywords might have been as much a workaround for the wretched keyboard (even worse than the one on the Atari 400) as a way to shave a handful of bytes out of the ROM image.

How would things go if you submitted an iOS version of that? Things have changed.

Look up Best of FTA. Used to be you could get it to drop to a BASIC prompt, but I think the current version reboots on Ctrl-Reset. I tried changing the startup slot in the Control Panel, but got nowhere with that. I think you could still transfer ProDOS filesystem images over to it and use it as a more general-purpose Apple IIGS emulator, but I've not tried doing that yet.

I am sure its just geo-ip location. I don't think they'd put GPS on the device. To many applications have inside structures with metal roofs, and underground where GPS works poorly if at all.

The Sprint Airave I used to have came with a GPS antenna on a long cable that you were supposed to put next to a window. It needed GPS not for location purposes, but because CDMA requires a highly-accurate clock to work properly.

You could get into the Mini Assembler the same way on an Apple //e.

Only with the enhanced ROMs. Mine didn't come with them. About four years after it was purchased, a friend with an enhanced IIe and an EPROM burner copied the ROMs in his machine for me...add in a 65C02 and I ended up with an enhanced IIe for maybe $10 in parts.

ProMash does a great job with this. By far the best brewing software I've used.

It works pretty well under Wine, too. I've looked at some of the alternatives, but I'd need a way to import at least the recipes that I've accumulated in ProMash.