Suggested reading: R. A. Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night"

Yes it was out for what seemed like an hour. My cell phone showed no bars for Verizon. Fortunately I still have a land line.

I learned coding from an IBM 7094 Operations Manual and then from an IBM Fortran II manual in the 60s

This move on MS part implies that BASH commands and the BASH approach to solving simple scripting problems will be almost universal since Android and OSX run BASH as do most forms of Linux. Learning to write BASH scripts should be valuable just about everywhere. Furthermore, once you get used to the BASH command line and scripting, switching to Ubuntu (or any other form of Linux) by itself should be easy. Anyone interested in going this direction might want to have a look at using the Xtra-PC USB thumb drive as an interim step since it contains a full implementation of Ubuntu Linux.