besides a passion for programming, i am a hardcore gamer. having no desire to write business apps when i get out of school and feeling less than secure about developing websites for a living, it seems that game programming could be an ideal choice for me. so i spent today surfing a few sites. one thing kept turning up. OpenGL. here is a quote from openGL.org
Supported on all UNIX� workstations, and shipped standard with every Windows 95/98/2000/NT and MacOS PC, no other graphics API operates on a wider range of hardware platforms and software environments. OpenGL runs on every major operating system including Mac OS, OS/2, UNIX, Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, OPENStep, and BeOS; it also works with every major windowing system, including Win32, MacOS, Presentation Manager, and X-Window System. OpenGL is callable from Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Perl and Java and offers complete independence from network protocols and topologies.
leave it to say, i'm impressed