Floating Point Visually Explained (2017)
This is a bit odd:<p>"Trivia: People who really wanted a hardware floating point unit in 1991 could buy one. The only people who could possibly want one back then would have been scientists (as per Intel understanding of the market). They were marketed as "Math CoProcessor". "<p>The 486DX (1989) was already common in 91/92 and came with a floating point unit. I had a 50mhz 486DX, and I was not by any means wealthy. FP unit was certainly used by lots of software, especially things like Excel, but C compilers certainly produced code for it if you had one.<p>Likewise, the 68040 (1990) had onboard FP. Macintosh Quadra, Amiga 4000, and various NeXT models had it.<p>Yes if you bought a 386 you often had to get a floating point co-processor as upgrade, but it wasn't _that_ uncommon. Same on the 68k series; I knew people with Atari MegaSTes (68000) that bought an FP co-processor. They weren't astronomers :-)<p>This feels like recent history, am I really that old?