Calculators on desktops (was Re: Octal)

[Jim Battle]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
> On 9/2/2006 at 11:48 PM John Honniball wrote:
> 
>> Um, it's Institute of Electrical and Electronic
>> Engineers, the people who devised the standard
>> for floating-point representation.
> 
> One has to ask "Why?"  It seems that mainframes got along just fine for
> years and years without a "standard".  For that matter, does any machine
> actually carry out computations in IEEE format, or is the situation like
> the x86 NDP--convert to a higher-precision "internal" format before
> jiggling bits?

 From the web page of William Kahan's, foremost expert in the IEEE fp 
standardization effort, a paper frmo 1981 titled:

Why do we need a floating-point arithmetic standard?

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/why-ieee.pdf

It includes some tables of the features of FP arithmetic of various 
mainframe architectures, plus some handheld calculators, and the hp-85. 
  Interestingly, it mentions the proposed IEEE standard, as implemented 
by the intel 8087 and the motorola 6839.

It runs 50 pages and I have only glossed it, but it could be a good 
place to start to answer this question.