I love all of this, but at least let your students use vi, it was around back then (or close). plus they don’t have to give it up when they go back in the real world, it’s an evergreen skill!

I took a very similar class 9 years ago, and it was honestly one of the most helpful things I got out of my CS degree. The low level and limited tooling taught me to think before I start writing.

I've had other people look askanse at me, but on greenfield work I tend to start with pen and graph paper. I'm not even writing pseudocode, but diagramming a loose graph with potential functions or classes and arrows interconnecting them. Obviously this can be taken too far, full waterfall planning will be a different exercise in frustration.

I find spending a few hours planning out ahead of time before opening an editor saves me tons of time actually coding. I've never had a project even loosely resemble the paper diagram, but the exercise of thinking through the general structure ahead of time makes me way more productive when it comes time to start writing code. I've tried diagramming and scaffolding in my editor, but then I end up actually writing code instead of big picture diagramming. Writing it on paper where I know I'll have to retype everything anyway removes the distractions of what method to use or what to name a variable.

The few times I've vibe-coded something this was super helpful, since then I can give much more concrete and focused prompts.

My first real program was a UVEPROM copier. It was written in MC6800 Machine Code, and we had 256 bytes (not kilobytes) of RAM for everything; including the code. That was in 1983.

I am currently working in Swift, with an LLM, on a fairly good-sized app, in Xcode, for a device that probably has a minimum of 64 GB of storage, and 8 GB of RAM.

I don’t really miss the good ol’ days, to be honest. I’m having a blast.

I took several classes along these lines in college; one writing a rudimentary OS on bare metal 68k asm, wiring up peripherals on breadboards, etc. Creating an ALU using only 74 series logic chips and the like. This was 30y ago, but the 1970s chips were already antiques, but the lessons were timeless. I'm happy courses like this still exist and I wish everyone had an opportunity to take them as part of standard computer science curriculum. For me at least, they fundamentally shaped my perspective of computing machinery that I never would have experienced otherwise.

Today I program 6502/7 asm for my Atari to help me unwind and it grounds me and gives me joy, while in my day job I'm easily 10 levels of abstractions higher.

>> Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

My first job out of university I was taught how to use a line editor in IBM UniData. It was interesting getting used to writing code that way.

But it was an amazing day when I discovered that the "program table" was just a directory on the server I could mount over FTP and use Notepad++.

still remember my assembly class with HC11 20 yrs ago: amazed by how much we can do with so little hardware.

Whoa, I didn’t know such an thing existed. What emulator do you use?

Is this course online available? Sounds like great fun.