Sounds familiar. One of my first classes as an undergrad started with boolean logic and boolean gates, then IIRC (it's been a minute) assembly for a theoretical processor.
I had a class (in the late 90s/00s) where we had to code to a theoretical RISCish CPU, but the teacher had built a simulator for it which allowed you to inspect registries, flags, execute instructions step by step etc
On my case, on digital circuits lectures we did the whole thing, starting with boolean logic, gates implementation, using stuff like SPICE, eventually we designed our own toy CPU, the actual implementation on a breadboard was left as an optional exercise, which on my year I think no one did.
