[Simh] Looking for a milestone

[Timothe Litt]

On 17-Oct-16 13:42, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:35 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net
> <mailto:paulkoning at 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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