Crystal radios or DSP first

Topics that were excellent at motivating students 50 years ago don't seem so exciting today. Yet they are still in our curricula. Circuits were once a hot topic, and many a lad wanted to know how they worked and how to build them. Now our students are more likely to have tinkered with a computer than built a crystal radio. This paper puts forward the idea that Digital Signal Processing (DSP) should be the first engineering course for our students. They can better relate to the multimedia that DSP delivers to us daily, while a properly designed DSP course can teach many fundamental concepts, concepts our present introductory courses claim to teach. As a further heresy, the paper even proposes that DSP should be taught as a service course for non-EEs.