Niklaus Wirth is one of those unsung geniuses of computer science. He invented Pascal, the Modulas, Oberon ... Then he woke up one morning wanting to reboot his life's work for his class and, undeterred by the fact the original targeted processor did not exist anymore, settled to write his own computer architecture on a Xilinx Spartan. He then successfully ported the Oberon system and compiler to this architecture to demonstrate to his students.