I had bought an inexpensive FPGA board to play around with programmable logic and then later learned about CPLDs (from a bigmessowires project report at <a href="http://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/</a>), which seemed a better, cheaper fit for what I want to do.<p>I wanted to know more about the background and history of these programmable logic technologies and this tutorial was fantastic, so I posted it here.<p>Hackaday also has some great articles and tutorials on this topic: <a href="http://hackaday.com/2008/12/11/how-to-programmable-logic-devices-cpld/" rel="nofollow">http://hackaday.com/2008/12/11/how-to-programmable-logic-dev...</a>, <a href="http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/cpld-tutorial-learn-programmable-logic-the-easy-way/" rel="nofollow">http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/cpld-tutorial-learn-programma...</a>