Hacker News Reader

Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

UIUC 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?

View on HN

At UC Berkeley in the early-mid 90s, I think I had two digital design courses. The first was low level basics like understanding logic gates, flip flops, gray coding, PROM, ALUs, multiplexers, etc., with a physical project using 7000-series chips on breadboard. The second was the whole 32 bit MIPS/SPIM pipelined CPU design and simulation project based on the Patterson and Hennessy text book.

But, I seem to recall there were ways to bypass most hardware background knowledge for a CS degree. You had to do intro math and physics that did classical mechanics, but you could stop short of most of the electromagnetic stuff or multivariate calculus. You could get your breadth credits in other areas like statistics, philosophy, and biology. I think you could also bypass digital design with mix of other CS intro courses like algorithms, operating systems, compilers, graphics, database systems, and maybe AI?

> 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

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404647

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397327

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.

That curricula is often more specifically called "Computer Engineering". CS students meanwhile usually aren't bothered by anything below the compiler.

I actually started Illinois as a Computer Engineering major and switched to Computer Science because I thought I'd get to use all the cool supercomputers at the Beckman Institute. Those electrical courses were all part of my CS requirements. Illinois CS was big on architecture, having designed Illiac and all of that stuff. Hennessy/Patterson for life.

The supercomputer thing... never happened. And I turned out to have a CE career anyway.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com