https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/...
But my logic labs were also done on FPGAs.
Yes, I think now it's mostly the 74AHC, 74ALVC, some 74ALS/74HC families (maybe others) Depends on the application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400-series_integrated_circuit...
(using the fpga is fine, but I'd probably want to focus on the circuit itself ant not something like VHDL at first)
The professor was simultaneously the founder of a company that made FPGA boards for EE students. They also made a little microcontroller board that was basically Arduino before Arduino; we used that in another class where we made robots and programmed them in AVR assembly.
It's actually something that an EE may end up using in their career quite often if they're doing board design.
Though, we normally use CPLDs for that kind of stuff now, but if you can get away with a few logic chips, maybe it can simplify the design.
If you just use theoretical perfect lossless and timeless components you completely miss and forget about a huge portion of EE which is not just designing the logic but actually implementing it in reality. It sounds like the EE program was setting people up to take the real world and imperfections into account while the CS version of the same course makes the valid assumption an electrical engineer has already provided the hardware platform so you can focus on the logical implementation.
>Isn't the key lesson to learn the logic flow design
In CS yes, in EE no. In EE that is only one of many key lessons, and without interlocking with other key lessons necessary to pick the real world components you end up with a circuit that either works purely out of luck, only in low-speed designs in noiseless environments, or not reliably.