In 1981 the VAX 11-780 was an object of lust for engineering undergrads, who'd be lured by faculty with promises of access to the "1 MIPS, 1 MB RAM beast" ...

In 1981 the VAX 11-780 was an object of lust for engineering undergrads, who'd be lured by faculty with promises of access to the "1 MIPS, 1 MB RAM beast" ... The author says he re-implemented the CPU (using Verilog) on an FPGA running at 50 MHz, well enough to run a test binary successfully.