Always happy to talk about this stuff!
Have you read any of the essays/papers/anecdotes on jsoftware.com yet? They expand a lot on the history of APL, and it's pretty fascinating.
A fun quote that highlights how many years ahead APL and the companies built around APL were/are even decades later:
Working at IPSA, with its far-flung offices and its Mailbox, it was possible to “know” a person for years without ever meeting the person. Well into my IPSA career, I asked Lib Gibson, “Is Leslie Goldsmith a guy or a girl?”
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLQA.htm
(IPSA was I.P. Sharp Associates, which long before that ran a huge amount of the APL in the world, remotely. Kind of like a primitive cloud, though then called time-sharing.)
I wish I had a contextualized summary like this a few months ago when I first started to look into APL/j/k/q. Had a similar feeling when I first looked into Lisp and stumbled through the overwhelming amount of implementations and nuggets of information spread around the web & mailing list archives. Comments like yours really help (kinda like when you're lost in an RPG and after wandering around for a while & feeling lost you bump into this NPC who has the information you need to get further).
bookmarked