Irosenman: I think we lived at the golden age of computers. I remember when, I think it was Byte magazine, published the first 8080 kit schematics. At the time I knew enough to trace through and see just how it worked, was able to do a little low level programming to interface a few things, and loved the DEC 8 when we finally got one at work.
then things jumped to higher level languages, and the chips became very intensely concentrated. I guess someone has to learn that and keep the development up, but I would think that now only a handful of exceptionally specialized designers know how it works, and maybe not all of it.
I understand now that you can pretty much order whatever logic you want, and a standard chip set can be sort of burned to make the kind of system you want, even wasting some potential on the chip because it is easier to make a complex one cheaply and use those than design various ones for specialized use.
I hope to see the world in twenty years but will be lucky to do so. I'm lucky to have had exposure as I have, and still amazed at the advancements in not only the electronics but the computer science in discovering fast, reliable ways to, for example, do indexes and searches. The self hovering drones that take helicopter like videos now and 'almost' self driving cars are no doubt going to get fine tuned in another decade.
What kind of systems did you work with?