Now I'm feeling inadequate. Growing up in an intel dominated world, you couldn't touch a Sparc or MIPS machine if you were a mere mortal. Everything accessible to me was on windows, and the hard to load versions of *BSD or linux. Nowadays, we're beginning to get access to ARM machines like the Raspberry Pi, or 8 bit things like PICs or Atmels.

Funny thing is, high cost compilers are suddenly becoming free such as Windows with their VS stuff. While gcc has been the gold standard, because it's been free, newer technologies such as LLVM are also beginning to thrive in the free and open source world. Amazing times we live in!