Hardware parsing of BASIC?

So Iwas taking a closer look at the HP 1351A "Graphics Generator" I have. It's currently in operable condition, except that it won't draw text (apparently there's something wrong with the character generator, the :TX commands do nothing at all). I was surprised to discover that the 1351 (c. 1981) doesn't containa microprocessor or microcontroller of any kind -- all parsing of the command language it supports is done in hardware (TTL). (The service manual contains this gem: "The 1351A only accepts commands listed in this manual and in the Operating and Programming manual. Any others, especially those mentioned above will 'lock up' the 1351A such that it will have to be re-initialized...") At any rate, this reminded me of something that I'm prettysure I read here on cctalk years back, but I can't seem to find any reference toit anywhere; there was a computer designed at some university that ran an interpreted language (I'm pretty sure it was BASIC), on the metal-- that is, much like the 1351A and its vector description language, this machine's hardware parsed BASIC program text and executed it directly, rather than implementing some machine language. Does this ring any bells, or am I insane? (It's quite possible that both of these things are true...)