IEEE 754-1985 - History

History

In 1976 Intel began planning to produce a floating point coprocessor. Dr John Palmer, the manager of the effort, persuaded them that they should try to develop a standard for all their floating point operations. William Kahan was hired as a consultant; he had helped improve the accuracy of Hewlett Packard's calculators. Kahan initially recommended that the floating point base be decimal but the hardware design of the coprocessor was too far advanced to make that change.

The work within Intel worried other vendors, who set up a standardization effort to ensure a 'level playing field'. Kahan attended the second IEEE 754 standards working group meeting, held in November 1977. Here, he received permission from Intel to put forward a draft proposal based on the standard arithmetic part of their design for a coprocessor. The arguments over gradual underflow lasted until 1981 when an expert commissioned by DEC to assess it sided against the dissenters.

Even before it was approved, the draft standard had been implemented by a number of manufacturers. The Intel 8087, which was announced in 1980, was the first chip to implement the draft standard.