Per the author's introduction to himself, in 1977 I wrote my first FORTRAN program on punched cards. The program ran on some kind of IBM mainframe located on another college campus some 50 miles away...

Per the encouragement to go with a Mac Mini...YES ABSOLUTELY!!! As he writes, productivity is with the person, not the machine. Good grief, what's wrong with some people? Are they running climate change models or nuclear fission simulations?