Same as me, 16 years as well. Was this kind of assignment in vogue at the time, discussed between professors / grad students at academic conferences? My assig

Same as me, 16 years as well. Was this kind of assignment in vogue at the time, discussed between professors / grad students at academic conferences? My assignment involved writing assembly on some virtual machine with a weird byte/word size and dozens of addressing modes, as well as a (virtual) tape device. I think it was called CUSP but I can't find any references for it now.