[gaius]

When I were a lad, everyone you'd meet in the industry had started out doing C on Unix, and had then specialised, maybe they liked Unix more and became sysadmins, maybe they liked C more and wrote Motif apps, or branched further out into C++ on Windows. But everyone had that core, fundamental knowledge. Nowadays people go straight into the very abstract stuff, and have nothing to tie it all together with.

[twic]

C on UNIX? You were lucky! My dad had to toggle the bootloader into the front panel every morning before he could even run the assembler!

[gaius]

Maybe, but I'm only talking 15-20 years ago. So much has been lost in a relatively short time.