I wasn't trying to insult you or anything, my comment was just my (extremely) sleepy attempt to express an idea that I've had shuffling around in my mind for a

I wasn't trying to insult you or anything, my comment was just my (extremely) sleepy attempt to express an idea that I've had shuffling around in my mind for a while now. At times there's nothing I want to do more than solder components onto a circuit board and make a radio or something. It's really, really gratifying to make something work that's so "magical" (from a certain point of view, radio is pretty magical to me) and completely understand how everything works from start (bare materials) to finish (a working radio!). I guess what I was trying to say was that if I would ever want to make a CPU comparable to, say, what Intel produces today, I'd have to give up my soldering gun and any notion of manufacturing the CPU with any discrete process (like soldering individual transistors) and instead adopt an entirely new approach - like maybe electroplating - in any event, it's one that allows me to make incredibly powerful things at the expense of being able to "use my hands". Experts are always going to need to know (and I mean really KNOW) the underlying fundamentals of their field regardless of how "high level" their work becomes - see theoretical physics, et al. With that in mind, I think people who care deeply about how bits are laid out in memory are exactly the same people who will always be at the forefront of computer science and software engineering - even if 99% of their practical output in life is at a level much higher than bits. :)