Yup, I remember those very well. The course, IIRC, covered both assembler and C. Teaching myself 6502 assembler back in my high school/junior college days helped me a great deal, even though the 6502 was vastly more limited.
I later did some 8086 assembler in my first job as well, mainly some routines for testing a QIC tape drive.
Mad props if you spent weekends in the Woodshop trying to make your MPs compile. Nice to see a fellow Illini around.
And yeah, there was C in that class too. Mostly enough to make sure you understood pointers so that you could get into the homework and shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly.
It was one of my favorite classes during my time there. I also had some 6502 experience which helped. But I think CS225 solidified the idea of "either you're going to understand this for the rest of your life, or you're not. Choose now."
The best part was when they gave an entire class of 250 CS students one ancient Pyramid to compile their C code on. Compile times of 30 minutes and more for hello world were not unheard of. Thanks UIUC.
I was on that Pyramid too. uxa.cso.uiuc.edu for life, yo.
The key was having some kind of terminal and modem back at the dorm so you could log into the system after the labs were closed. You literally had the entire machine to yourself all night long. =)
I later did some 8086 assembler in my first job as well, mainly some routines for testing a QIC tape drive.