The "innovation" here obviously isn't in the "cutting edge technology that moves the state of the art forward" at all. The innovation at the time was that the

The "innovation" here obviously isn't in the "cutting edge technology that moves the state of the art forward" at all. The innovation at the time was that the conventional wisdom that it's "effectively impossible" to do small custom ASIC runs for relatively cheap. Most were laughed at back then when this topic was brought up for other use cases. While I'm sure none of that was super exciting to someone who works on custom ASIC design for some enterprise, it was pretty neat watching effectively a bunch of hackers figure the process out and do it for a tenth of the predicted "first chip" costs. This has a lot of value in of itself, simply proving something is possible for $a_lot_of_money+skill vs. $epic_truckloads_of_money. Nowadays it's not super interesting since you're back to needing to be a "big player" to get into the game - but for a year or so it was a real fun time to be a bystander and watch the rapid pace of development.