Slashdot Mirror
'Retro Programming' Teaches Using 1980s Machines
Death Metal Maniac writes "A few lucky British students are taking a computing class at the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park using 30-year-old or older machines. From the article: '"The computing A-level is about how computers work and if you ask anyone how it works they will not be able to tell you," said Doug Abrams, an ICT teacher from Ousedale School in Newport Pagnell, who was one of the first to use the machines in lessons. For Mr Abrams the old machines have two cardinal virtues; their sluggishness and the direct connection they have with the user. "Modern computers go too fast," said Mr Abrams. "You can see the instructions happening for real with these machines. They need to have that understanding for the A-level."'"
That could teach them a thing or two about commerce and trade, I suppose.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
We had to remote into this old Unix System V box and do a few exercises for our course education. No, its not as far back as these students were going but it was helpful to become familiar with that kind of architecture, because you never know whats still going to be kicking around when you get on the job.
Makes a lot more sense than starting them off in some poo like Java where they never need to know about the real hardware.
Trolling is a art,
I feel us programmers have gotten too far away from the lower level aspects of the craft and are now too higher level focused. While, this isn't a bad thing (why should you rewrite a framework everytime you start a new application) - it really perverts ones respects for how things work and efficency.
I am getting back into assembly programming after 8 years of C# and it is a bit of a shift in thought. My college switched from C/C++ to Java my senior year for incoming freshman - a real shame. Programming is totally different when you have no respect of memory management.
Uhm, we were saying that in the 1980s. At Bletchley Park they should be teaching with machines that actually are old.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
You would get exactly the same "feel" as you get with an old C=64 or Atari or Amiga machine. If your goal is to get down to the bare metal, then go ahead and do so. There's no need to dust-off old machines that are on the verge of death (from age).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
... if you want to know how computers work, learn microcontrollers with the Atmel 8 bit family of controllers (ATMEGA8, for example). These things are wonderfully documented, there is a free C/ASM development environment with emulator (single-step, breakpoints, etc.). The real deal is just a few dollars for a development board (or get an Arduino, same thing). You don't get the absolutely down to the transistor insight, but that's really just a few experiments with TTL gate chips and LEDs away.
They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware.
The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store.
It was a noisy, confusing and funny simulation and, once everyone knew what they were doing, managed to reach a maximum clock speed of about one instruction per minute.
I wish I had a teacher like this while in [US public] school.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Yes, it makes sense. The students get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources ramapantly.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Next up: Driver's Eduction on the Model T. ;)
We ran some older machines in my first programming course. When you can see the direct results in speed (or lack of) it can help teach better approaches. Writing a game and seeing the screen flicker when you ask the CPU to do too much is good modivation to find a more effectient approach. One our our instructors also did something like this with visual sorting procedures. If you can see the difference in speed between one sorting approach and another, it sinks in.
The computing A-level is about how computers work and if you ask anyone how it works they will not be able to tell you
That's what most people would say when you asked them how something works. Computers, fermentation, a Wok . . . etc.
"Um . . . I dunno . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I wasn't alone in keeping '286, 386, and '486 boxes around until Pentiums became prolific...and the same goes for dual cores etc...you write code that runs fast on the older generations, and you never hear user-land complaints about your stuff's performance on the new.
.NET....well, now you're only as good as Microsoft is.
Of course, with the advent of
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
One of the great things about the early micros (and probably the even-earlier minis) is that they were Knowable. With a little time, an intelligent person could become familiar with the workings of the entire architecture. I used to have a map of every memory location in the 64KB of ye olde C64 (most of it was user RAM of course) explaining what each byte was for. POKE a different value to a certain address, and the background color changes. PEEK at a certain address and it tells you the current hour. You could learn this... all of it. Obviously that's just not possible with modern computers (probably not even modern phones); no one person can grok the whole system.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yes, it makes perfect sense for two reasons.
A) It teaches people how to use unfamiliar hardware/software. Chances are the thing you are going to be running at your job is not going to be the thing you studied in university for.
B) It teaches kids how to not make mistakes in coding. Make a big enough mistake and the entire system goes down. Compilers are also a lot less fault tolerant.
C) It teaches kids how computers actually work by pealing back layers of abstraction. Think about it, has the average person under 20 ever used a CLI? For anything? I think the closest people come these days to actually using a CLI is typing in something on the Windows "Run" dialog.
D) It puts things in perspective. It shows how you don't need a Core i7 to play games, that a graphics card with 100 times the memory of the entire computer isn't required to make art, etc.
E) Its fun. The old computers had a lot more easter eggs built in and little tiny quirks. These days you get a Dell/HP/Gateway/Acer/Asus/etc slap Windows/Linux/OS X on it and its the same as any other Windows/Linux/OS X box, but the old computers all had little things different, some things were frustrating of course, but when you don't have to do it for any too serious of work, it can be kinda fun digging out the old Commodore 64.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The five soon discovered that just because a program was simple did not mean the underlying code was straight-forward. To make matters more testing, the BBC Micro offers a very unforgiving programming environment.
My first piece of commercial programming was on a BBC Micro and having that environment didn't teach me anything, it just made programming more of a pain than being able to cut and paste, set debug breaks and so forth. And it doesn't teach any more than using C#/VB because it's a machine designed around using BASIC, which is itself an abstraction (and IIRC, you didn't have functions, so had to endure the horror of GOSUB/RETURN).
How will the student then apply his knowledge to modern languages such as Java, C# ? He'll have to optimize his code by doing a bunch of tests, just as he would have did without that class. With a flags and the time (in ms) required by each of the different methods, he will understand, for example, that quick sort is faster than bubble sort. And so it goes.
It's not about "understanding low-level programming" - it's about having a direct connection between what you do and what happens. No virtual machine, no garbage collector, no super-fast compile/link/run/modify cycle (s you're going to take a few minutes to THINK about why something didn't work instead of just doing the "quick fix let's test it and see if we got it right this time" route).
The article never said they were using Windows.
If you want to get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources, try embedded systems programming. The microchip 10F series has only a few dozen bytes of ram, and a couple hundred words of flash. And no hardware multiply. Making it do useful things is an art. Oh, and unlike some relic from the 70's, you can actually get a job programming for tiny microcontrollers.
That said, it does seem like a cool class. One I'd like to take, but for personal interest, not professional development.
How will the student then apply his knowledge to modern languages such as Java, C# ?
It's really pretty simple. After seeing what a computer can do with code intimately optimized for the machine it's running on, they will be exposed to the status quo in Java or C# and their heads will explode. Problem solved on our end!
Edlin should be a mandatory part of the course for the full immersive effect.
Or was that the 70's? Gosh I can't remember now cuz I'm so old.
Actaually the BBC PC isn't far from the perfect embedded system trainer.
From the Wilkipedia.
"The machine included a number of extra I/O interfaces: serial and parallel printer ports; an 8-bit general purpose digital I/O port; a port offering four analogue inputs, a light pen input, and switch inputs; and an expansion connector (the "1 MHz bus") that enabled other hardware to be connected. Extra ROMs could be fitted (four on the PCB or sixteen with expansion hardware) and accessed via paged memory. An Econet network interface and a disk drive interface were available as options. All motherboards had space for the electronic components, but Econet was rarely fitted. Additionally, an Acorn proprietary interface called the "Tube" allowed a second processor to be added. Three models of second processor were offered by Acorn, based on the 6502, Z80 and 32016 CPUs. The Tube was later used in third-party add-ons, including a Zilog Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machine to run CP/M programs."
Four A2Ds 8 bits of GIO, and switch inputs. All available from Basic on a machine with a Floppy, Keyboard, and Monitor. Sweet.
I so wanted one of these back in the day. Too expensive and not really available in the US at the time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Absolutely. Better teach them C so they will know how data structures and memory management work.
Languages that try to do everything may help you write code faster but can be treacherous.
Let's see a simple example. In Python there is a subtle matter of memory management that can be dangerous to the untrained programmer. When you copy a list like this: a = b you are creating a pointer to the other list, when you copy like this: a = b[:] you are allocating memory for a new list and copying the contents.
When you know C, the difference between the two copy instructions above is obvious, but if you don't know what is memory management this can become very difficult to understand. I bet there are many bugs created by Java, Python, and other modern languages that come from this inability to understand how the language works under the hood.
Working on old computers can be fun for some people, but to train programmers nothing beats learning C. C is close enough to the hardware to let one understand the details of how software runs, yet abstract enough to represent any typical von Neumann computer.
Yes, it makes great sense. WHen getting started, it really helps if you're forced to deal with the low level, and more if you can actually see the low level.
I've spent a large part of my career writing software realted to tape drives. It really helped me getting started that I could sit down in front on an old IBM 9-track reel-to-reel to test my code. Not the most useful thing for production data storage, but terrific for seeing problems with production code. Miss the end-of-tape marker? Flap-flap-flap-flap doh!
Similarly, writing and debugging production assembly code made me very comfortable with debugging and crash analysis on higher-level languages, even if I didn't quite have matching source. And that experience in turn lets me understand "what really happens" with a language like C# or Java, and for example explain to people why, for example, the .NET file rename function is no substitute for the Win32 file rename system call, despite the fact "they both just rename a file". STuff that should be obvious to even a junior programmer but, well, isn't.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Amongst our weaponry are such things as...I'll start over.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
from the link: "using 30-year-old or older machines."
from the fine article: "First released in 1981; discontinued in 1994 using 30-year-old or older machines."
I recently (three weekends ago) fired up my Commodore PET 2001 (a *genuine* pre-1980 computer) and have been writing a Forth for it. It's really a lot of fun, and I'm finding that 30 years experience in various high-level languages has improved my "6502 assembler golf" game a lot. It's very incomplete, but the inner interpreter mostly works. Feel free to throw down on it here
Charlie
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
Seriously, how is this useful in modern computing, other than as a "Back in my day..." quote?
Learning how to use older/simpler machines is an excellent way to learn about a number of fundamental concepts. Modern computing, for all its advances, still operates off the same fundamental principles as it did fifty years ago; it's simply become orders of magnitude more complex.
Now, while it's perfectly possible to learn how to do this sort of thing using emulation or specialized training software, there's real value to having an appreciation of the history of the field you're planning to enter, and working with machines that were once considered state-of-the-art is a very effective way to gain a sense of just how insanely far computing has come. Note, too, that simply because you're never going to be called upon to program a PDP-8 in real life doesn't mean that you can't learn a fair amount of generally-applicable knowledge about hardware, logic, branching, execution, input, output, and instruction sets. In fact, by pulling yourself out of a familiar environment, you're forced to pay attention to important things that you'd otherwise happily ignore--like "well, how does what is in my head actually get into a computer's inner workings?"
Finally, always remember that programming is a subset of computer science. Even if all you ever expect to do is write code, a deeper knowledge of what goes on between the compiler and the electrons is going to be quite useful--and will make you a better coder, to boot.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Or at least cause their head veins to pulse as shown in this computer lab photo.
10 years ago when I went through University, the core of the mandatory Assembly programming course was taught on the PDP-11 architecture, then 30 and now 40 years old.
Granted it's not quite the same. We used emulators and not the real things. Also it was for different motivations. The prof felt it was simpler to teach the cleaner PDP-11 instruction set than the 80x86 or 680x0, although the course did eventually also extend to both. Also he happened to be an expert in systems like the PDP-11.
However the idea of using old systems as teaching aids is hardly new - or news IMO.
I was using them at college when they were new.
My first job was writing software that controlled scientific instruments and their was an awful lot of eductaional software written for them because they were designed to be used in schools. The Basic was more structuured and it could use microcassettes or 5 1/4 flopies with its own DOS.
In short, if you are going to use a dinosaur, it is the best dinosaur to choose
I thought we were supposed to pick the two we liked and ignore the others...
I first used edlin on DOS 1.0 and was kept using it until better alternatives (norton edit, anyone?) appeared. Edlin makes vi seem like a walk in the park. I've used edlin for assembly and Pascal programming, and I say "curse you!" to anyone who jokes about those dark days.
I was in AP computer science over a decade ago. We used C++ using the "apstring" and "apvector" classes that were similar to the STL.
We of course had to implement bubble short, quicksort, insertion sort, and so.
It was fairly slow on our computers (386s/486s/maybe one pentium!) and you could REALLY see a visible difference between the difference sorts. It was very obvious.
I rewrote the sorts using standard C arrays instead of apvector. Even on those ancient computers, the differences were suddenly almost gone. Bubblesort using straight arrays was faster than apvector quicksort--at least for fairly small arrays. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but you had to be sorting IIRC several thousand things before there was much of a recognizable difference.
So yeah, that made a big impression on me. Then again that class, and intro classes in college were the last time I've had to write my own sorting algorithm...
I think it's a good thing that people who have maybe only used 2ghz+ computers are given a chance to experience something else. I guess a better question would be, why is expanding your horizons ever a bad thing?
How will the student then apply his knowledge to modern languages such as Java, C# ?
Do you believe that a school should teach Java, or teach programming?
BTW, C++ can kernel-mode C programming jobs aren't going away, and tend to pay better than Java jobs as the talent pool is growing smaller. Especially for kernel-mode programming, very few schools are turning out bright young talent with any relevent skills in that area, so the labor pool is aging out but the demand isn't shrinking.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They're A-level students, i.e. the final two years of school, ages 16-17 and 17-18. It's probably more interesting than making some crappy VB application, which is what I remember the A-level computing students doing (I didn't do the subject, I did extra maths instead -- it was much more useful for finding a place on a good CS course at university).
If you want to get an intimate feel for writing programs without being able to waste resources, try embedded systems programming. The microchip 10F series has only a few dozen bytes of ram, and a couple hundred words of flash. And no hardware multiply. Making it do useful things is an art. Oh, and unlike some relic from the 70's, you can actually get a job programming for tiny microcontrollers.
Agreed on all of the above, but the experience of working on the relics will translate to modern embedded systems sufficiently well that I think there is value. In many cases the relics will be even slower and be more RAM- and ROM-constrained than all but the the tiniest of today's embedded microcontrollers.
I don't know what the A level syllabus is, but I suspect it is more about learning how computers work in preparation for a university degree than about learning how to program in any particular language. Quite frankly I think they should keep things as fundamental as possible at this stage. Students can always go to community college if they wish to learn how to set up outlook, operate excel or write java etc.
Nullius in verba
I think it's because apstring and apvector were both simplified versions of the real deal. And the entire source code for both was pretty small and understandable for people just getting into C++, templates, etc.
We at least created modified versions of them as well, extending or re-implimenting certain functions. I don't really remember too many specifics!
For Mr Abrams the old machines have two cardinal virtues; their sluggishness and the direct connection they have with the user.
Another hacker learning skill you must obtain, that he forgot to mention, is how to completely master a system. This is different from merely learning enough.
At one point, I could tell you every minute detail of OS-9 (the motorola 6809 CPU OS, not the apple product two decades later) and I also nearly mastered 68hc11 assembly, Z-80 assembler, and the PDP-8.
There is no point trying to teach kids how to master something using, perhaps, the linux kernel, because its too freaking big, at least for a one or two semester course.
The mastery skill requires figuring out what you don't know and then figuring out how to find it. Very much like spatial mapping, I see a blank spot in my map of how it all works, so how will I get from where I know to where I don't know? Also you learn how to learn the philosophy of a complete working system, sort of a C/S ecology mindset. Finally there is a bit of reflective thinking that interacts across now usually broadly separated problem areas, look how the memory allocation system has reflected onto the design of the I/O drivers and vice versa.
Learning how to master a topic is a valuable skill, and at least for CS students, frankly best learned on the smaller older stuff. Too many newbies think asking small specific questions of google is all they need, and think they can scale up to a big project merely by asking more little questions, without thinking thru the big picture.
A fourth thing the dude forgot is that older computers were MORE powerful. Power is what comes out of the barrel of a gun, its not P=I*V or MIPS. A single old MVS mainframe could run a small govt department or a multinational corp.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've spent many years working with microcontrollers. I wholeheartedly agree.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I'll bet, though, that in those cases where the performance really is that critical you're a lot more able to deal with it than someone who thinks the nested loop takes ZERO time.
And yet, when that routine needs to run three billion times per execution, it completes a few hours faster than a slightly less-efficient algorithm! That's a significant improvement for any company today working with large-scale data. A lesser programmer simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Another factor is the conceptual model is simpler. It is possible to know the entire layout of one of these classic machines. The CPU, instruction set, registers, I/O chips and memory layout. You can exactly where a program will load in memory. A 6502 has an Accumulator, X register, Y register, 6 flags, a stack pointer and a program counter. It is possible to know exactly how the computer works on both a hardware and software level.
Try that with a PC, what happens when you flip the power switch. Well which BIOS, what POST tests, what hardware? What happens up to the point where the boot sector is loaded? What happens after control has been turned over to the boot loader? What about the hardware? There are so many combinations, so many drivers, etc. How do you even go about teaching these things when you can't be sure of what hardware you will have in the classroom?
The classic machines flatten this out. Even in emulation they are very helpful tools for teaching.
vi +
Oh, the luxury.
In my digital design course we had to build a simple computer. After we'd demonstrated adders made out of NAND gates we were allowed to use an arithmetic unit chip, and wired things up with latches etc. so we had a workable bus. Programming was accomplished through DIP switches and output via an LED bank. Just like they used to do (substituting LEDs for light bulbs). When you programmed those things you made sure your code was efficient otherwise your hand would get tired flipping the switches.
The really cool part was when we wired two of them together.
A) It teaches people how to use unfamiliar hardware/software. Chances are the thing you are going to be running at your job is not going to be the thing you studied in university for.
C) It teaches kids how computers actually work by pealing back layers of abstraction. Think about it, has the average person under 20 ever used a CLI? For anything? I think the closest people come these days to actually using a CLI is typing in something on the Windows "Run" dialog.
I can't stress this enough. I'm 22 - so close to the age range you mentioned, and I had only ever used Windows 3.1 when I was around 3 to 5 years old, and even then it was just to boot up some old Kings Quest or Math Tutor game - and beyond that I only ever used to use the MS-DOS prompt on Windows 95 for ipconfig so that we could get a good Age of Empires game going. Once I got into the Polytechnic that changed a lot because one of our professors was very Linux happy and learning to use the terminal on a Fedora machine was great experience. He then insisted that we learn to do the same (or attempt to do the same) in the command line on our windows machines.
I ask other people a few years younger than me, who would even consider themselves computer experts, because they know how to build one from scratch and the hotkeys associated with Windows - but any of the ones who haven't gone to school basically don't know how to use that kind of interface. Or if they've used it, they know how to run about 4 commands, but not how to navigate through the file structure to execute various tasks.
It's true, today's computers ARE too fast for students.
Kids today don't know the joy of being able to slack off for 5 to 10 minutes in class while their screen says "Compiling..."
So I just used Reflector to decompile System.IO.File.Move and, unsurprisingly, it calls the win32 MoveFile function. So why is the win32 function such a win?
This reminds me of a quote I read from Philippe Khan back in the really old days. He used the original IBM PC (4.77 MHz) to test code (Turbo Pascal) when much faster (8 MHz) machines were available. He said he "liked to watch the computer work".
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I noticed a bunch of low (even 4 digit)/. user ids in this thread -- like the guy who got the CP/M box off craigslist. I think it would be quite interesting to do a correlation between low /. user IDs and opinion on the subject. The hypothesis is that older people will have a softer spot for older machines.
Myself? I think learning to program in older machines is a great idea. But then again I learned to program in Sinclair ZX-81's BASIC language -- back when 16kb was a memory expansion...
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
The .NET File.Move() (and FileInfo.MoveTo()) calls the Win32 MoveFile(), but you really need MoveFileEx().
Requirement: update a file in such a way that all other processes see the update as atomic, even if you crash at an arbitrary point. (Not an uncommon problem in systems programming.)
Solution: make the change to a copy of the file in a temp area, then "rename over" the known file to get the atomicity you need.
This approach to making file updates atomic is a fundamental property of a filesystem, but unavailable through the obvious .NET classes (they throw if the destination exists).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I was learning Pascal on an 8080 in 1997 in High School. It was retro, but not in the way you think is cool - it was in the we have NO money way
Oh, and unlike some relic from the 70's, you can actually get a job programming for tiny microcontrollers.
Just last year, I was working for a company (A fairly large one) and they were still running programs written in DEC FORTRAN 77 on Vaxen. A part of my job was to port these programs to an.......Alpha.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't think this is something that's worth doing for *vocational* reasons. You don't do this because you'll produce a supply of programmers who are better at the flavor du jour of programming language. You don't do it as an *alternative* to access to modern machines either.
You do it for *educational* purposes, to produce people who understand on a deeper level what is going on than somebody who has studied for some kind of vocational certification. Perhaps they'll go onto be hardware designers, or systems programmers. Maybe they'll design the next generation of computer architectures. Or maybe they'll go on to be a code monkey in the language du jour -- but it won't have hurt them to have been exposed to this stuff.
Naturally, you have to couple this with the right curriculum and the right teachers. For example, students could learn the bad habit of premature optimization which many of us who learned on these machines did. But you can also teach fundamentally sound coding practice such as sound algorithm selection using basic tasks like sorting and selection. Of course you can do that today as well, but you're immediately into somewhat more advanced mathematics like graph or number theory. That's good stuff too, but it won't hurt to have got a more hands on feel for what makes a program efficient using more basic concepts first before moving on to the stuff that's really interesting from an algorithmic perspective today.
In short, it's not necessary or sufficient to teach students to program on old hardware, but in the right curriculum with the right teachers, it could certainly be beneficial. With the wrong teachers, it could be pointless or even harmful.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is true. A-levels aren't about getting a trade job immediately. They're essentially college prep classes, though very different from US style. Why teach and indoctrinate in a particular language today when by the time they're out of school the fashions will have changed? Principles are far more important.
I'm reminded of something that happened to me while I was a student assistant at a remote job entry location of a university's computer facilities.
The incoming batch of engineering freshmen were being taught, as was the tradition, to program badly in FORTRAN. An instructor assigned them the problem of counting the ways to make change for a dollar, assuming you had plenty of all the denominations of coins. How did he have them do it? Nested DO loops, one per denomination, with each denomination running from 0 to 100 / the denomination's value, of course!
The result? Bunches of students exceeding the thirty-second time limit for WATFIV jobs so their programs were cancelled before they finished. They'd run them again, of course--maybe the first time was a fluke. (The university ran on a 370/138 at the time....) Then they'd come in and ask how to run in a different job class so they weren't limited to thirty seconds.
I wrote a program in Algol W with a recursive function that would solve the general change making problem. It solved the specific one in 0.01 seconds. A friend and coworker (alas, no longer with us) wrote a non-recursive program in FORTRAN that took less than 0.01 seconds, so that the output showed it as running in 0.00 seconds. Our boss took the listings and output and had a discussion with the instructor. He, and I hope his students, learned something.
Nowadays, they wouldn't. Today's computers would run the horribly inefficient version so quickly that nobody would care, and they'd move on to the next thing.
So I applaud this approach, and hope everyone gets that experience.
I don't know what the A level syllabus is
It's a little over a decade since I did mine, and I don't know how much they've changed. But FWIW mine involved partly learning algorhythms / programming - in Pascal, with tiny bits of assembly - and partly a bunch of theoretical stuff such as binary (floating point) arithmetic, BNF, Codd's normal forms, basic hardware/architecture principles & protocols, etc. I can't claim to remember the proportion very accurately. Somewhere between 30:70 and 50:50 I think.