Same here. I was 8 or 9 years old and couldn't understand how chips worked. They were just sort of magic to me, so I wired all my solutions without chips. It required a massive mess of logic gates to solve things like the Ventilation Shaft and Minefield puzzles in level 4.

The signals puzzle in level 5 was as far as I could get... but it got me hooked on algorithmic problem solving.

Edit: to get an idea of the complexity of the puzzles, here's a link to a walkthrough of level 4:

http://mysite.verizon.net/thomasfoote/DQ/id28.htm

I actually did the exact same thing! I staid away from the chips because they were to black-boxish and then gave up on level 5.

I have yet to see a current-gen game with as awesome a circuit wiring mechanic as RO.

It's almost like Max+Plus II for the Apple II.

So I did CS & Eng, the courses we had that covered parameterized digital blocks (& Verilog/VHDL) were ECS 154A and B