In my university, probably because the CS department at the time was an underfunded offshoot of the faculty of Mathematics, we basically didn't have access to computers (and I didn't have a laptop of my own).

We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had taken "shortcuts".