I was a Science Reference Librarian at John Crerar Library in Chicago in the early 70's, and this sounds very familiar, although we tended to get a slightly more focused set of questions (and our boss Mr. Quinn was much more pleasant!). I love Wikipedia, but the books in our Reference Collection were remarkable.
I can remember the days! I suppose as problems grow in size, it's not too surprising that older methods of coping with what seemed like lots of data are still applicable.
A friend of mine wrote a book about what happened in Germany: Scientists under Hitler : politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen. I'm about a third of the way through it, but they mixed politics with the physical sciences to a remarkable degree, driving away many of the best people and isolating German scientists.
PostScript's magic is subtle. I once tried writing a PostScript interpreter in ADA. Got far enough to display the turkey example and realized that PostScript code can modify itself and decided I didn't want to go there.
I started programming in college in the late 60's and it was cards up until the mid 70's when I got access to a PDP-10 with TECO as an editor. Online editing made longer and more ambitious programs much more feasible. Cards were sort of neat, though.
I remember the Apollo reps moaning that the speed of Motorola's 68k chips weren't keeping up the the x86. I still have an Apollo motheroard with two 68k chips on it -- a work around to enable virtual memory.
Back in the day I worked quite a bit with Knuth's early SAIL (an extended Algol on the PDP-10) implementation of Metafont. They could have used some of the documentation the later WEB versions had as he tended to get tricky with squeezing everything out of the 36-bit words (which I was porting to a 32-bit word machine). But the code was an education and a joy to read well before he polished it for publication.
I read my first Fortran manual about 1964 (my father was an engineer), but didn't have access to a computer until college in '65/'66. I always had my choice of languages, so I've used a couple dozen fairly seriously, including SAIL, BLISS, Metafont, Tex, Forth, APL, Fortran, C, Java, Python. Now it's just recreational programming when I get the itch, e.g. hand coding a string package in WASM.