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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 17-Oct-16 13:42, Clem Cole wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAC20D2PEGc94J6yDHSumXQH=rPxSFkg6VM0+DPE_5HMJJk7UEg@mail.gmail.com"
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:35 PM,
Paul Koning <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:paulkoning@comcast.net" target="_blank">paulkoning@comcast.net</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">That
doesn't excuse sloppy work. </blockquote>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</div>
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style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Then again
our own old employer, DEC took a long time to get around to
using an IEEE FP scheme. While DEC was <i><u>much better </u></i>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.</div>
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I think Bob was ~1990, and built on much earlier work. He took over
DXML from my group after Aquarius.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
She was the architect of the (unfortunate) POLY instruction.<br>
<br>
W/ Dileep Bhandarkar:<br>
VAX floating point: a solid foundation for numerical computation<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=641849&dl=ACM&coll=DL">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=641849&dl=ACM&coll=DL</a><br>
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