Similar story here - I taught myself 68000 assembly by hex-dumping the opcodes out of the only compiler I could afford (i.e. free), and then taught myself calcu

Similar story here - I taught myself 68000 assembly by hex-dumping the opcodes out of the only compiler I could afford (i.e. free), and then taught myself calculus to find the tangents along a bezier-curve for my flagship product at the time (a 3D editor/converter, which eventually sold quite well) I've also had the severe displeasure of working with CS grads who couldn't figure out why a 54MB file wouldn't fit on a floppy disk, or asked "where is the .EXE" when working on a windows web site. I'd take a motivated "self-learner" over a paper-backed "scientist" any day.