> On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:36 PM, John Levine wrote: > > It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) said: >> I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say >> what he did about the beginnings of POSIX. >> >> Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for >> representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to >> preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360. > > In view of the well known horrible numeric properities of the hex > floating point, why? Because they had so much code written to work > around it? > > R's, > John Maybe I knew back then, but anything I say now is supposition. I suppose the same mindset that wanted to see PL.8 succeed as PL/I revisited wanted to see 801 succeed as 370 revisited. In any case, quite a few of the Yorktown people that moved to Austin to help with what became RS/6000 came with the notion HFP was the true course. Though you were no longer involved in that time frame, IIRC, you probably had a better sense than most non-IBM people of why I said "it was more like Mn competing factions within N competing companies.” That Phil Hester was able to force 754 instead of HFP is more a credit to his political and technical skills than most non-IBM could appreciate. Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer@technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer