alt Hacker NewsUIUC CS grad from the late 80s. CS students had to take a track of electrical engineering courses. Physics E&M, intro EE, digital circuits, microprocessor/ALU design, microprocessor interfacing.... It paid off immensely in my embedded development career.
I'm guessing this isn't part of most curricula anymore?
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Where I studied, they reduced that, at least the workload and class time, in favor of more math and informatics.
Definitely no ALU design on the curriculum, no interfacing or busses, very little physics. They don't even put a multimeter in your hand.
Informatics is considered a branch of logic. If you want to know how to design a computer, you should have studied EE, is their thinking.
That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.
> I'm guessing this isn't part of most curricula anymore
My sibling is a CS@UIUC grad and they as well as CS+X were still required to do that.
In other universities such as Cal it's a different story. Systems programming and computer architecture course requirements have either been significantly reduced or eliminated entirely in CS programs over the past decade.
I've documented this change before on HN [0][1][2]. The CS major has been increasingly deskilled in the US.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516
I had to take computer architecture. We made a 4 bit CPU... or maybe it was 8 bit. I can't remember. But it was all in a software breadboard simulator thing. LogicWorks.