<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:36 PM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div>It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer@technologists.com> said:<br><blockquote type="cite">I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say <br>what he did about the beginnings of POSIX.<br><br>Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for <br>representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to <br>preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360. <br></blockquote><br>In view of the well known horrible numeric properities of the hex<br>floating point, why? Because they had so much code written to work<br>around it?<br><br>R's,<br>John<br></div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.” </div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Charlie</div><br><div>
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