I can vouch for the majority if not all universities in my country and all of Scandinavia. I don't dare speak for europe as a whole, mostly because the UK does things more like in the US, see Dijkstras commments on the difference between continental and anlgo-saxon engineers.
Yes, we covered the electrical bit of computers briefly, because the chemistry bit is not very interesting when writing software. Two's complement and IEEE 754 etc. are interesting, so we learned that.
My physics and chemistry are on high school level only, so energy levels, S,P,D,F clouds is what I remember from chemistry. The last physics I recall was special relativity, general relativity, time and space dilation, quantum mechanics, the copenhagen interpretation etc. I was not really into those subjects and this was years ago now.
I don't see what physics have to do with how integers are represented other than the fact that one way to do it is to use eletricity and transistors. Another way of looking at it is to see the registers as tuples of ones and zeroes. In reality, errors happen on levels below the bit, but the best we can do about that is to use checksums etc. or so you use your chemistry skills when writing software storing phone numbers?
When I say we learned how to build memory, I mean how to build gates out of transistors, how to use them to build latches and flip flops, building registers and larger circuits of read/write memory. No, I'm not interested in the strings to fermions to hadrons to semi conductors to transistors bit, but knock yourself out ,I will not write down instructions for you how to build a latch out of quarks.
We read Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum.
> Thanks for the downvote(s) by the way! Glad I'm allowed to have a real, intellectual conversation on HN.
Thanks for making HN look like reddit. I have no idea who's downvoting, I did not know you could downvote on HN.
Another difference between Sweden and the US is that in Sweden if you're studying CS then you spend 4 years taking basically nothing but CS and Math classes. Sure you can take classes outside of those departments, but it's neither necessary nor actively encourages.
In the US it seems that most people take a far wider variety of courses. So even people who major in CS have dabbled in some Humanities, Languages and/or other sciences.
I got worked up because your comments are just like any of the other millions of Computer-Scientists-don't-know-anything-about-anything-and-are-only-in-it-for-the-money comments you see everywhere. You could have spent two minutes googling looking at curriculums.
As a Swede, I could have included more EE courses in my CS masters degree than you have in your engineering degree, had I wanted to.
Yes, we covered the electrical bit of computers briefly, because the chemistry bit is not very interesting when writing software. Two's complement and IEEE 754 etc. are interesting, so we learned that.
My physics and chemistry are on high school level only, so energy levels, S,P,D,F clouds is what I remember from chemistry. The last physics I recall was special relativity, general relativity, time and space dilation, quantum mechanics, the copenhagen interpretation etc. I was not really into those subjects and this was years ago now.
I don't see what physics have to do with how integers are represented other than the fact that one way to do it is to use eletricity and transistors. Another way of looking at it is to see the registers as tuples of ones and zeroes. In reality, errors happen on levels below the bit, but the best we can do about that is to use checksums etc. or so you use your chemistry skills when writing software storing phone numbers?
When I say we learned how to build memory, I mean how to build gates out of transistors, how to use them to build latches and flip flops, building registers and larger circuits of read/write memory. No, I'm not interested in the strings to fermions to hadrons to semi conductors to transistors bit, but knock yourself out ,I will not write down instructions for you how to build a latch out of quarks.
We read Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum.
> Thanks for the downvote(s) by the way! Glad I'm allowed to have a real, intellectual conversation on HN.
Thanks for making HN look like reddit. I have no idea who's downvoting, I did not know you could downvote on HN.