My old roommates called me and told me that I had a pile of mail waiting for me in the old apartment. So I picked it up, and yes, it was quite a pile, probably about 15 pounds. I threw out the obvious junk mail on the way to the subway station and then sorted the remaining half more carefully on the 1 train heading downtown. In the Village, I sat down in a cafe and read for a few hours. The treasure in the pile was an issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. I thought that reconfigurable computing was a development tied to the availability of FPGAs and other sophisticated programmable logic devices. It turns out that Gerald Estrin developed reconfigurable computers in 1960. His motivation then was the same as the motivation now: Custom hardware always beats general purpose hardware.