I graduated from the University of Western Ontario, in London Canada. It is a fine university- one of the best in the country. I have a Batchelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, and you can see photographs of some of the DEC and CDC mainframe computers I used back in the day.  In those days, the new  Computer Science cirriculum focused on automata theory, logical circuitry design, numerical algorith development, machine assembly language programming, and high level programming languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL and PASCAL. A new language called "C" and an new Operating System called UNIX were just being developed. UNIX is. of course, the predecessor of LINUX, and both Operating Systems were written in C.

 

There is no doubt that the computer technology I studied has been greatly advanced over the decades. But I believe that studying fundamentals - i.e. automata theory, being proficient in machine assembly languages, and aware of memory limitations and manual memory overlay techhniques has imparted to me many "lost" programming skills. In my opinion, these skills are just not commonly developed in today's CS or IT graduates. Most often, they are now studied as a specilization at the Post-Doc level. I cut my teeth on the fundamentals of machine level programming that is again necessary today to develop applications that can scale to large core counts. Maybe someday I will program again...