this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Assembly used to be a required course for CS undergrads in the 90s. Is that no longer the case?
Also we had to take something called Computer Architecture, which was like an EE class designing circuits with gates and shit.
Which target did you use? Having to learn even a fraction of modern x86 would be ridiculous, but SPARC or something could be good to know, just to reduce the "magic box" effect.
I learned MIPS as an undergrad. Pretty neat little RISC architecture.
I learned mips as graduate. In undergrad had to build with logic gates for things like 2 digit decimal counter and my architecture classes were diagram blocks for a simple CPU. But by that time we knew how to do moderate complexity circuits in VHDL simulation, and we had to make a simple VHDL circuit run for real in FPGA.
This was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure it was 8086.
Its still a thing
Required course work for electrical engineers in the early 2000s.
I had to learn assembly but was one topic of many we handled in architecture. Like one question of one exam. That was one of the toughest professors we had, class was about 2001
I still had to do that in the late 2010s in college
I think the university I went to phased out the EE requirements the year after me. Honestly, I think it should be required. Understanding how the computer "thinks" is such an important skill.
I attended two different Bachelor's courses, one with a very technical (2016-2018) and one with a more high level focus (2018-2023). The first did have a class where we learned how to go from logic gates to a full ALU as well as some actual EE classes, but I didn't go far enough or memorise the list of classes to remember whether Assembly would have become a thing. We learned programming with first Processing, then C and C++.
The second had C as an elective course, and that was as technical and low-level as it ever got.