On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:36 PM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer@technologists.com> 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 <em>M<sub>n</sub></em> competing factions within <em>N</em> 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
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