Mark McDougall wrote:
Granted, the Amiga has a HDD and much more RAM than an 880KB floppy...
Granted, I recently returned to school (part-time) after a 15 year
hiatus, and instead of going for a Comp Sci degree, I decided upon a
Comp Engineering degree.
IMHO, you definitely made the right choice! I did Comp Sci straight out
of high school, and found myself bored-as-batshit writing insurance
applications - uggh!! After 4 years I couldn't take it any more and went
back part-time to study Elec Eng. After 7 years part-time study - how I
wish I had made that choice first!! You learn the software basics in EE
anyway and obviously the rest of the course is far and above anything
they teach you in Comp Sci - and much, much more fun because you get to
tinker with projects exactly like you describe!
In defense of Comp Sci as a major for hardware tinkerers, there are
opportunities in the field of design automation. I work for the EDA
group in a large, blue company and can assure you the work strikes a
terrific balance between the abstract and the touchable. The only thing
better than designing hardware, IMHO, is designing and developing
software to make the hardware designer's life easier.
A software person with good understanding of the hardware domain is
worth their weight in gold. And, no, not all the jobs have moved to
India (yet).