I have dabbled in all, mastered probably none. An older friend of mine made millions from an RTOS he wrote in the 80s. He also wrote his own tcp/ip stack, cros

I have dabbled in all, mastered probably none. An older friend of mine made millions from an RTOS he wrote in the 80s. He also wrote his own tcp/ip stack, cross assemblers, built his own ICE debuggers and other stuff. However, he knows very little else :-P He is almost always surprised by "what computers can do". Specializing did something strange to this man; he does the impossible and remains ignorant of the trivial. He only programs in C and Assembly languages but was surprised to discover there were syntax-highliting editors for assembly. He knows most algorithms that we toss around in conversation in chip form; to him MPEG, AVI, MD5, and SHA1 are all silicon things, never "written". I taught him what a "packer" was for executable binaries.