PDP era and a question

Tony wrote: Most FPGAs can't be used in that manner in a practical fasion anyhow. Normally you have to put the FPGA into a special programming mode, during which it loads its configuriation and is otherwise non-functional. The closest you could get to self-modifying is to have an FPGA configuration that computes a new configuration, writes it to external RAM, and then resets itself (forcing a reconfiguration). This would almost certainly require at least a small amount of external dedicated logic to select which configuration memory to use and to control the timing of the update. There was a line of FPGAs specifically designed for reconfigurable computing; it divided up the FPGA into sections and allowed reconfiguration at section granularity. I think it was made by either Actel or Atmel.