Good points. Just to clarify in case folks take your experience in 2005 as the rule, while certainly not as widespread as today, ML was definitely being offered at various universities in the late 90s and early 2000s: for example, the textbook "Machine Learning" by Tom Mitchell [1] was published in 1997 and was used in the undergrad ML class at Georgia Tech when I took it in 2001-2002.
That was why I said wasn't really a thing being offered. There were certainly some classes that dabbled in the general area, but nothing that I can remember that came out and said "this is Machine Learning".
At least in my Computer Engineering curriculum it was very much about the electrical engineering and software development fundamentals.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mitchell/ftp/mlboo...