Re: Parsing timestamps?

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

But was it the case by the mid/late 70's - or certain individuals saw an
opportunity to influence the burgeoning microprocessor market?  Notions of
single and double precision already existed in software floating point -

Hardware floating point also had single and double precision.  The
really awful 1960s systems were gone by the mid 70s.  But there were a
lot of competing formats, ranging from bad to mostly-ok.  VAX floating
point was mostly ok, DEC wanted IEEE to adopt it, Kahan was ok with
that, but Intel thought "go for the best possible".  Kahan's
retrospectives on this stuff are good reading:

   http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/index.htm

I've linked a few of them.  I liked the quote

  It was remarkable that so many hardware people there, knowing how
  difficult p754 would be, agreed that it should benefit the community
  at large. If it encouraged the production of floating-point software
  and eased the development of reliable software, it would help create a
  larger market for everyone's hardware. This degree of altruism was so
  astonishing that MATLAB's creator Dr. Cleve Moler used to advise
  foreign visitors not to miss the country's two most awesome
  spectacles: the Grand Canyon, and meetings of IEEE p754.

from http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html