[hermitdev]

I used such a program, I think from Altair, in 2000 to design and simulate an 8-bit CPU not all dissimilar from the one in the article as part of an undergrad computer architecture course. It was all drag & drop from a logic gate level. You could build your own components out of gates (or include others). IIRC, we had a module for registers supplied to us, for example.

It was pretty slick. It included a simulator as well. I imagine it probably used verilog or vhdl under the hood (but I wouldn't learn Verilog proper until 3 years after). I think there was functionality to work with an FPGA, but we didn't use it for the class.

It was definitely the sort of project that really got me excited in college and I knew for sure I was on the right track with what I wanted to study.