On 17-Oct-16 13:42, Clem Cole wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:35 PM, Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net > <mailto:paulkon...@comcast.net>> wrote: > > That doesn't excuse sloppy work. > > > Agreed - and you will rarely see me defend Seymour. His systems > were fast, but they were not programmer friendly in any way IMO. Heck > the man never had an assembler - he did not think it was needed, he > used programmed in octal. > > As I said, close enough for government work seemed to be his mantra; > and as long as the US National Labs kept buying from him, clearly he > was getting feedback that was an ok way to design. > > Then again our own old employer, DEC took a long time to get around to > using an IEEE FP scheme. While DEC was /_much better _/at arithmetic > than CDC/Cray ever was, it was not until the PMAX and Alpha that DEC > started to support IEEE. My old friend and colleague Bob Hanek (whom > I used to joke as the Mr. Floating Point), once said to me at lunch, > he thought trying to get correct results from the Vax FP unit made him > lose his hair. Note that Bob was hardly a great fan of IEEE either, > he can regale you with stories of issues with it also. As I an OS > guy, I would smile and just say, I'll thankfully leave that you guys > in the compiler and runtime. > I think Bob was ~1990, and built on much earlier work. He took over DXML from my group after Aquarius.
Ms. Floating point was Mary Payne. Mary was into accuracy long before IEEE - she was DEC's rep to that committee. Before that, she worked on the PDP-10 math libraries, (un)popularizing "good to the last bit" among software, microcode and hardware folk alike. I don't remember the exact date, ~mid 70s. She was one of the earliest odd-discipline people to be promoted to consultant engineer. She was the architect of the (unfortunate) POLY instruction. W/ Dileep Bhandarkar: VAX floating point: a solid foundation for numerical computation http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=641849&dl=ACM&coll=DL
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