FPGA VAX update

[Tony Duell]

> An aside to all this is one of the annoying things when I was studying 
> computers early one (3++ decades ago) was "computer books" would endlessly
> detail logic at the gate and flipflop level. Maybe discuss arithmetic and
> sequential logic. They never quite cross the line to how these blocks form

Ues! Or else you got books that treated the processor as a black box. In 
fact there were/are people who believe there's something magical about a 
processor, that it can't be understood in terms of gates and FFs. 
Nonsense, of course.

I remembrr when I got my first mini (a Philips P850), I sat down with the 
techncial manual and started to understand how that processor worked. It 
all became clear very quickly.

> computers. It wasn't until the PDP-8 handbooks that there was a connection
> of the ideas of sequential logic controlling arithmetic and logical blocks.  

A similar thing happened to me concerning telephone exchanges. Plety of 
books explained relays and selectors. They would then give a sort-of 
block description of a large exchange, with no detail. It all made no 
sense to me. And then I got the well-known book 'Telephony'. This 
contains some actual scheamtics for (electromechanical) exchanges, 
explaining what the relays do and why. At last it all made a lot of sense.

-tony