I'm not sure if I define CS that narrowly, but anyway I was working with the C compiler, not the asm code. It was a good learning tool for me because of the simple output and the slow processor, which meant that I didn't need to worry much about the graphics and that poorly performing code was immediately, painfully noticeable. There were plenty of data structures to work with sprites, characters, screens, etc.
My CS course (in the late 90s) kind of went the other way. One of the earliest courses was one that taught how a cpu operates -- what a register is, what the accumulator is, etc. There was no actually programming, just working through the steps of what the computer does to perform a given operation. After that there were a number of directions to go in.