History
In 1976 Intel began planning to produce a floating point coprocessor. Dr John Palmer, the manager of the effort, persuaded them that they should try to develop a standard for all their floating point operations. William Kahan was hired as a consultant; he had helped improve the accuracy of Hewlett Packard's calculators. Kahan initially recommended that the floating point base be decimal but the hardware design of the coprocessor was too far advanced to make that change.
The work within Intel worried other vendors, who set up a standardization effort to ensure a 'level playing field'. Kahan attended the second IEEE 754 standards working group meeting, held in November 1977. Here, he received permission from Intel to put forward a draft proposal based on the standard arithmetic part of their design for a coprocessor. The arguments over gradual underflow lasted until 1981 when an expert commissioned by DEC to assess it sided against the dissenters.
Even before it was approved, the draft standard had been implemented by a number of manufacturers. The Intel 8087, which was announced in 1980, was the first chip to implement the draft standard.
Read more about this topic: IEEE 754-1985
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)