Early in his college career, contrary to most guidance received, Kurt decided not to specialize. That was probably the best decision that could have been made. He saw how everything can be the same at some level of abstraction, instead of having to focus on how various things are different.
How this mode of thinking helped:
When Kurt developed lateral control algorithms for TI, they were able to be used on other programs that benefited Texas Instruments and the U.S. Government.
When he heard Alan Kay speak at TI about his Viviarium concept and Dynabook, it stuck with Kurt who saw that it would require technology not existing in the 1980’s like high speed wireless networking and either a network operating system ot at least a network programming language. The NASA SBIR program provided funding for Kurt to pursue those areas. The Wireless Headset project allowed development of a wireless digital capacity and led to the creation of TeleNexus and subsequently to business areas of highway toll collection and radio frequency ID tags.