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This is silly to start teaching assembler, You must first learn nand gates ;)

Actually on my university we had digital circuit design one year before Assembly classes.

And many universities do follow books like "From NAND 2 Tetris".

This is silly to start teaching nand gates, you must first learn semiconductor physics ;)

But to understand semiconductors you first need to understand quantum mechanics. And to understand QM you first need to understand classical physics.

Oops, I think we just ran out of time for a masters program. ;)

You can make gates out of more than just electronics (mechanical, electromechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic computers all exist), hence the suggestion to start there --- the abstraction doesn't really leak.

The hydraulics will probably start leaking.

More seriously, it is possible to fit quite a lot of this stuff into an undergrad program - my Cambridge degree included logic gates (including drawing silicon layout with coloured pens), computer architecture (ARM assembler), a lab on FPGAs, Java, Standard ML (for type inference and lambda calculus), and had plenty of time left over for higher level topics.

Current syllabus: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/cst.pdf (one term = 8 weeks)

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