" No. I can honestly say we never took apart a compiler in school."
Although I'd already been doing it for a while as a hobby, polytechnic level ELECTRICAL/ELECTRONICS engineering (3000 level - basically the same as 6th form) in 1984 had us creating "on paper" processors, writing assembly code and stepping through the programs to understand how they worked - along with doing some level of Boolean work and making gate arrays.
We then got to play with an (on paper) compiler to turn higher level code into assembler to see how it worked.
The lecturers (rightly) felt that it was critical that circuit and power monkies had a reasonable understanding of the guts of microprocessors because they were in the process of or about to turn the entire industry on its head (it depended which industry, but all aspects ended up being affected) . Most of us ended up spinning out in the computer direction anyway, via various paths.
"A hardware engineer blows PALs, a software engineer burns PROMs"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
