In an operating systems class we had a little project to create a command line calculator in C, with the added hoop of using x86 ASM for all control flow and calculations. As this was not a programming class we had a very brief overview of the very basics needed to get this done. I assumed using floating point arithmetic would make this easier, but knew that was not part of the early spec, so I asked the professor in class what version of x86 and he said pentium 1.
I then found and read intel’s documentation for the first generation Pentium. Which completely changed my mental model of CPU’s. Honestly, it was probably the closest collage assignment to how real world coding works and much more useful long term than just implementing some simple algorithms by hand.