I wish more CS curricula would start with digital logic and stay there for a little longer before going into the full stored-program computer. That used to be the norm.
One of the first Pong ICs, the AY-3-8500, is reverse-engineered in this series of articles: https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2018/01/reverse-enginee...
I remember sneaking[1] into a few of those courses during university. Loved them.
The problem is that most computer science students viewed them as useless. They wanted to take, what they thought of as, useful courses. If it wasn't C++, it wasn't useful. Even the computer science students who were interested in pure math, these were computer science courses after all and the university offered a separate software engineering degree, didn't see them as useful.
A slight tangent: one of the courses I had the most fun wasn't even a computer science course. It was a philosophy course that spent a lot of time on computability. Cramming a bunch of genuinely interested social sciences students into the same room as a bunch of genuinely interested computer science students made for an absolutely amazing course. In contrast, the computer science department version of the course was populated by a majority of students who were only interested in the mandatory credit. It made for an astoundingly terrible course.
(These thoughts are from the perspective of a mid-1990's physics graduate.)
[1] Sneaking may not be the right term here. People in the department knew that I was doing this, to the point where I managed to get access to department computers and even managed to take a course for credit, with special permission from the professor and without the prerequisites, but the administration certainly didn't know about it since I didn't even bother with the official "auditing a course" route.
We see over and over again through history (Renaissance Italy, Bell Labs, Romantic-period Berlin, early-Google's cafeterias) how cross-disciplinary conversation inspires innovation.
The "useful" classes are necessary, but if institutions (or students) stop there then they have missed the whole point. They're treating class-work as office-work, and making that the summit of their ambition.
I am bringing that up because a lot of universities mandate interdisciplinary courses, yet sabotage their value by letting students limit themselves to introductory courses or even offer special courses directed towards non-majors. Students frequently attend those courses for an easy A, but never let their preconceptions be challenged or bothered to challenge the ideas of others.
(That said, I don't really blame students for treating universities as vocational schools. I'm pretty sure the ones who went straight for the grades found more success in their professional life simply because they didn't let intellectual curiosity interfere with their professional goals.)
I gestured at it, but didn't quite complete the thought, in my first comment: a cross-disciplinary culture is essential between professors and departments, not just students. If universities are to be engines of innovation, and not glorified job-training centers, then experts have to form social bonds, and have out-of-band conversations, and develop projects together, too.
"Didn't let intellectual curiosity interfere with their professional goals" is spot-on as an indictment of our entire culture, at the moment.
It followed such a lovely flow, starting with the absolute lowest level of computing (binary maths, diodes, transistors, and building logic gates with these) and kept on combining these building blocks until we arrived at modern computers and software.
Even if you're just a "modern age" developer that only ever uses modern programming languages, just understanding how everything is built makes you make better decisions all around.
Digital logic would go all the way from boolean logic to designing our own toy CPU, with implementation using discrete logic components left as optional for those that felt like going for the top score on the assignment.
Additionally we also had stuff like EEPROM programming as optional selection for the total credits.
Interestingly enough, stuff like Prolog and LP, was also a required lecture for both engineering degrees.
Even if we translate our degree names to CS, the contents of those 3 to 5 years are very much hands on, with many lectures requiring successful delivery of project assignments before attending respective exams.
https://catalog.utdallas.edu/2024/undergraduate/programs/ecs...
After Bologna, no one really takes the plain three years version, as the old degree was upgraded to include Msc, and everyone with the old degree also got equivalence to the new one with Msc, and no one wants to search for a job having only the lowest level degree.
Memory used to be ridiculously expensive, and it was cheaper to build a board full of dedicated logic than a simple CPU with a full-screen frame buffer.
My CE course was essentially an Electrical Engineering course with power distribution subjects replaced with programming subjects
I get that there's a timeline, and that following the timeline is a good way of building a base but...
But... you could also add it to the middle or end of a course. I feel students would be more likely to appreciate the material. Would also be good to have "easy" courses that aren't fluff.
of course nowadays i do the dumb shit everyone else is doing. import numpy as np, np.ones(arr), on and on. i once came across really convoluted business logic. rewrote that as a giant boolean expression and then simplified it using k maps. but when i tried to explain that in the kt session, they were like - what is k map ? what does that mean ? i thought wow i can explain it nicely and win the day. After all, in the kingdom of the blind, one eyed man is king. Instead, when i gave many examples and asked if they had any questions, they were like - what if a truck hits you on your way home ? then who will do this k map minimizing for us ? that’s when I suddenly recalled what actually happened in country of the blind. Nunez doesn’t become King. Instead, the blind fuckers chase Nunez to poke his eyes out. so in order to survive on the H1B, i had to forget all about the k map. pretend i am also blind and continue importing that numpy. otherwise i can forget about putting food on table.