Slightly off topic but the best place I know where to ask :) I'm finally getting around to deep diving into "The Early History of Smalltalk" http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_III.html
In particular, I'm interested in exploring the references in the following passage: "I liked the B5000 scheme, but Butler did not want to have to decode bytes, and pointed out that since an 8-bit byte had 256 total possibilities, what we should do is map different meanings onto different parts of the "instruction space." this would give us a "poor man's Huffman code" that would be both flexible and simple. All subsequent emulators at PARC used this general scheme." I've been able to find some good pointers to the B5000, like this gem: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/images/manuals/b5000/descrip/descrip.html and of course Barton's "A New approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer". Is there any more information available about treating the emulator codes as a lookup into the "instruction space" map? I feel this has interesting overlaps with the B220 data tape that contained its own decoding program but can't find much more about the specifics of that format either. thanks, shawn
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