Electronic Engineers & GP logic / FPGAs


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So I've got some questions for the electronic engineers around here :D.

I've got quite a few pretty old PCBs mainly from security products that I've been picking general purpose logic chips from (74xx, 74xxx, etc.) and I was looking up the spec sheets of some of them and they're from the 70s, 40 odd years ago! Seems mad that ICs have been around so long. So on any of the projects you work on (Not hobbyist stuff, but proper production-line stuff) do you still use any GP logic chips such as the 7400 or do you not bother with them and use alternatives?

Also there's the case of replacing complex logic (well, a function using many AND/OR/XOR/etc. gates) with a multiplexer or a PROM, do you do that or stick with logic or maybe use EPROM/EEPROM?

FPGAs - damn they are really quite fun! I didn't realise they had such a wide selection of logic gates you could just drag-and-drop onto the design and implement, it's crazy! Do you use any FPGAs in any commercial products or whilst developing, and if you do develop with them then go on to production, what do you replace them with? I know ASIC is similiar to FPGAs but are just programmed once and don't support reprogramming/reading the configuration from an EEPROM but unsure if they're used or if something else is or maybe a mask is made and a chip is made up on silicon? Has anyone tried out altera's NIOS2 with or without ucLinux ? The dev kit I ordered from china came with a DVD and 4 NIOS2 samples, one with ucLinux and the others normal but with/without certain LCDs, haven't managed to get any of them working though :/.

Oh and randomly I'm SURE I saw a picture of intel at a tradeshow once with a pre-production xeon but it wasn't a chip, it was a rather large black box or 6 large boxes and might have said CPU emulator? Anyone got any clue about the pic or how intel/amd/arm does test out it's CPU designs and whatnot?

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