It would have been kinda neat to learn assembly programming with the concepts from the article. When I was in school it was a required part of the curriculum and seemed like a gate that weeded out students since people complained it was so hard. Context of what assembly was used for and could be used on might have helped students understand better. I found it easy, almost free-ing, since there were so few instructions to use.
There are some really innovative ways things were accomplished back then as pointed out in the article.
8-bit Workshop[0] got me started on 2600 programming. I've since moved on to a local setup using Stella (emulator) and DASM (assembler), but it's a really easy place to start. The book advertised there is decent, but there are also some really good tutorials that can be found online, this one[1] is pretty popular.
There are some really innovative ways things were accomplished back then as pointed out in the article.