An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
Favorite quotes:<p>&gt; members of the committee, for the most part, were about equally altruistic. IBM&#x27;s Dr. Fred Ris was extremely supportive from the outset even though he knew that no IBM equipment in existence at the time had the slightest hope of conforming to the standard we were advocating. 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&#x27;s hardware. This degree of altruism was so astonishing that MATLAB&#x27;s creator Dr. Cleve Moler used to advise foreign visitors not to miss the country&#x27;s two most awesome spectacles: the Grand Canyon, and meetings of IEEE p754.<p>&gt; In the usual standards meetings everybody wants to grandfather in his own product. I think it is nice to have at least one example -- IEEE 754 is one -- where sleaze did not triumph. CDC, Cray and IBM could have weighed in and destroyed the whole thing had they so wished. Perhaps CDC and Cray thought `Microprocessors? Why should we worry?&#x27; In the end, all computer systems designers must try to make our things work well for the innumerable ( innumerate ?) programmers upon whom we all depend for the existence of a burgeoning market.<p>&gt; Epilog: The ACM&#x27;s Turing award went to Kahan in 1989.