[TUHS] arithmetic, Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Charles H. Sauer]

> On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:36 PM, John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer at 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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