Fog in games was never unintentional, it was just better than the alternative of glaringly obvious asset pop-in. They deliberately added fog to hide that, which the video essentially says, but then assumes necessity and intent are incompatible for some reason.
The bitness values quotes seem to be referring the highest bus-width interface in the consoles quoted, not the general purpose register/instruction size of the CPU involved...which is the same sort of absurd and deliberate obfuscation console makers at the time used to puff up various systems during the height of the bit wars (though Atari out did all the others by claiming two 32-bit processors running in tandem made it a 64-bit system).
As for blowing into cartridges, simply reseating them is what usually did the trick, but if they were full of cookie crumbs or cheeto dust, blowing that out could actually improve the connection...as could some of my more slovenly acquaintances, who would empty about a tablespoon of saliva into an iffy NES cart while blowing on them; all that spit, assuming it didn't short out the system, no doubt improved the conductivity of worn out contacts for at least a few minutes.
Props for the NextStep reference.
Also, DOS wasn't that hard, but I suppose people who were on their second or third languages while I was learning the ins and outs of IRQs and manipulating upper memory blocks with EMM386 or QEMM probably say the same thing about being bi or trilingual when it took me three years to learn about as many words in Spanish later in life.
I'll add my own thing that modern gamers don't tend to understand: THAC0 which is just subtraction, purely because it's subtraction. Any time I host/GM a tabletop RPG, one of the requirements to play is the ability to near instantly understand THAC0, even if the game we are playing has no similar mechanism. If you can't figure out THAC0, it means you can't subtract, and are probably a borderline illiterate, which means I am going to have to spend more time explaining the rules of just about anything rather than playing.
