Did you hang out at Maubert Electronics? I also recall a few RTC servers, blast from the past!
The software on this thing was pretty amazing, but surprisingly hacky in some ways. The RPL language had a system of embeddable objects in memory, but when the interpreter had to skip over an object (i.e all the time), there was no field marking its length, so it had to actually recurse through all the sub-objects to find the end.
IIRC there was the a hack where some memory locations could contain a direct pointer or a pointer to a pointer, and it would work either way because the same bits could be interpreted as a pointer or directly executed... or something of that sort.
Also, the model was popular in preparatory schools because of the expansion slots, it was possible to extend the memory by a huge margin.
This memory was useful to store, well everything you could, and at the time those calcs were not forbidden during exams.
Some people (including me) even wrote text editors and viewers with support to display a mix of text and picture for schematics, physics or chemical diagrams...
The US scene was also extremely helpful, with people such as JK Horn or Eric Rechlin.
Im 43 it guy and started playing with hp at 12, my own first « computer » with countless hours: playing, coding, debugging, reading txt files. Naturally when I bought my first intel computer at 19yo I installed freebsd, to later go to openbsd and Linux.
And the first thing I do on my android phone is to install hp48 emulator.
You may have heard of LZ4 or ZStd, the author is a French guy (currently employed by Facebook) who started hacking compressors on his HP48, this is how I met him a long time ago.