> How such critical knowledge can get lost in university training these days just amazes me.
It will probably have been taught.... but very briefly. Before going go back to analysing circuit schematics, where connections between components don't show resistance or inductance, and the capacitance of two parallel capacitors sums.
This is why lab exercises are important. I remember first building some actual TTL circuits on bread board, I learned very quickly that this whole digital stuff is a lot uglier and messier than on paper or in the simulator.
With sharp rise times, synced up to a common clock, even after soldering in a whole bunch of capacitors, you can still stick a probe pretty much anywhere and see switching spikes all over the place, from power rails to completely unrelated signals that are supposed to be stable. Using actual TTL, there was another funny lesson what this weird "fanout" value in the datasheet meant.
A similar lesson I learned that way (and a very memorable one :-)) was about flyback diodes.
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