Interesting. My CS course started right out of the gate with assembly. My fledgling computer course in high school started with Pascal instead of BASIC. Clearly, before "mid 2000s". Maybe I was taking classes out of order??? It was way to long ago for me to remember those details, but I was well underwater trying to jump right into the low level language. I remember struggling with pointers in Pascal until one day it finally clicked. Assembly came across to me as a weed out course right at the beginning.