@jpmzemke
You're saying that you were told that the non-extended precision 8087 was complely independent?
But that's already contradicted by my quote above; the project started in 1977 and the co-architect Palmer credited Kahan, and Kahan was 90% or more of IEEE 754.
Clearly they did a ton of work way before IEEE was finalized, so it's not that Palmer et al just copied IEEE, which didn't exist yet, but I'm trying to clarify that it's *also* true that IEEE wasn't a merely a copy of the 8087.
Kahan is called "The Father of Floating Point" for strong reasons.
Deeper more nuanced questions of credit splitting I have no idea about, but that *is* about nuance.
I'm sure the architects of the 8087 did lots of work, I'm not saying otherwise.
Floating point is a huge subject.
P.S. Numerical analysts and floating point experts say that, if you have accuracy problems, you can't just blindly go from 64 bit to 80 bit to fix them -- that's a fool's paradise.
80 bits helps as part of a solution, not as the whole solution.
But I digress.
