History of EDA (electronic design automation)?

[Al Kossow]

 > Did anyone salvage any of the very expensive hardware simulators of
 > the mid 80's?

Mentor and Valid both had systems which could integrate actual parts 
into a software simulation (Valid's was called RealChip).

The largest of these sorts of things were seas of Xilix FPGAs that 
attemtpted to simulate entire designs. The software wasn't very good, 
and while they simulated the design a few orders of magnitude faster 
than software simulators, they still were not very fast. One of these 
showed up at BDI this past year, with absolutely no interest from bidders.

I worked on MacOS bootstrapping of both the G3 at Somerset and the 
Exponential BiCMOS processors on those.