What I think was possible was understanding down to the level that you could reliably know what caused the Apple II to act in any given way. Was it possible al

What I think was possible was understanding down to the level that you could reliably know what caused the Apple II to act in any given way. Was it possible all the way down to the transistor level? Maybe not, but it didn't have to be in order to understand the behavior. It was certainly possible down through the IC level, and there were any number of people who achieved that sort of mastery. I don't believe that's still possible with any consumer general purpose computer. I think there are people out there with that level of understanding of specialized devices, probably up to and including things like Xbox and PS3. I don't know if there are people that understand an airbook to that level, or a desktop PC, or their webserver. Maybe, but it seems unlikely.