alt Hacker NewsOk, sure, windows.
But here’s one I heard literally two days ago: we counted three engineers (out of many) who knew that physical memory was not actually a giant flat space of contiguous addresses, and that there were multiple layers of address-mapping and region-joining glue logic between a program and the hardware, including in os libraries, and even inside the hardware.
Maybe knowing such information is archaic or useless for most engineers. But the good ones (or at least a certain flavor of the good ones) ask questions that lead them there.
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I wrote x86 assembly back when we were switching from real mode to protected mode, and I still have a feeling that I would not have been able to answer whatever question you asked there in a way that would satisfy you.
I also could no longer tell you how to balance a binary tree or implement Quicksort.
You seem to be under the impression that any part of the average contemporary identity-and-behavioral-development stack encourages asking questions. Babysitting/teach-to-the-test schools don't, authoritarian parents and community authorities and corporate overseers don't, consensus-manufacturing politicians and media don't. (Heck, even our national soccer team doesn't.)(That was a joke.)
Worse, people who find it within themselves to ask questions anyway frequently face silence or a smackdown. The Internet's Own Boy remains no longer with us.
But physical memory is a giant flat space of contiguous addresses. Do you mean virtual memory?