Lots of good geek-talk, NY! I used to work in an RTOS environment and also knew a few things like shell scripting languages (mostly csh or ksh). Have heard of most of the other things you mention but know nothing about them. I was mostly a high-level langugage girl, but even our HLL was low-level compared to most, because of the environment...an older telephone switching system where we had to manage our own timeslices, do bit shifting, and such like. My DH was a firmware engineer and specialized in assembly language & microcode, so he was even geekier than I!