Every day was a new adventure. In time, I peeled that system apart. I was working for GE designing discrete digital systems and writing software without a degree. I was lucky. It was a great opportunity.
Classes are very important but experience is more important.
You can take a class on microprocessors and pass with an A, but until you actually design and build something, with a budget and a schedule, its not real. I designed hardware and then wrote software for those systems. I also wrote some algorithms for analyzing digital circuits that I consider some of my best early work. The subject was electric power transmission and distribution. It was that work that led to my job at Enertech.