I agree 100%!!
I co-teach a class at University Of Massachusetts in Amherst using Bob Applegate's KIM-1 replicas.
We start with machine language programming, then move to an assembler, and teach all the low-level stuff; address bus, data bus, controls, clock, etc. and how to interface hardware.
Bob Jeffway
This is my first post, hopefully I did it right? Is a Reply All correct?
This is from a programmer's point of view but still interesting reading
Decent article! There's absolutely value in learning this old stuff. I still maintain that hacking on old computers at the architecture/machine code/asm level gave me a distinct advantage over "academically stronger" (better at memorizing, mostly) folks in college.
I don't know if they're still doing it, but at some point in talking with folks at the MIT Flea, someone had related that MIT was still offering either a comp arch or comp org type of course using the PDP-11. This was some time between 2010 and 2015. Like the article says, before a point it's possible to understand all parts of a whole system.
Thanks,
Jonathan