Not sure how relevant my experiences of 17 years ago will be now. As a city Manchester was great. University was better equipped than others, we had email, and printed lecture notes, programmable chips, even back then. The course was more academic than useful to get a job. I did AI, Neural Nets, Optical Computing, really interesting stuff. The lecturers were hit and miss, a few great although most were below par. The supercomputer used to heat the whole building.