In the fall of 1978, I was taking Prof. Szymanski's EECS 217 class, in which the main project was to write a toy assembler. He mentioned this paper of his, but it was not part of the course. At the time, nobody was doing anything with microprocessors in the department; we had a PDP-11/45 running Unix, and the university had an IBM 360/91 for card-punch batch jobs and a new 370/148 (158?) with graphics terminals. The later machines had different length jump instructions, I believe, so perhaps that inspired him.