XPost: rec.arts.comics.strips   
   From: petertrei@gmail.com   
      
   On 2/17/2026 11:58 AM, Paul S Person wrote:   
   > On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:31:33 -0500 (EST), kludge@panix.com (Scott   
   > Dorsey) wrote:   
   >   
   >> Thomas Koenig   wrote:   
   >>> Scott Dorsey  schrieb:   
   >>>> Cryptoengineer   wrote:   
   >>>>> DEC used to make a popular line of minicomputers under the name 'VAX'.   
   >>>>> That name is  also used by a brand of vacuum cleaners in the UK, but   
   >>>>> it did not lead to any legal issues when DEC started to sell Vaxen in   
   >>>>> Britain.   
   >>>>   
   >>>> They are extremely similar.  They both have pipes and filters.  And   
   >>>> the DEC floating point really sucks.   
   >>>   
   >>> It was _far_ better than IBM's hex format.  I think DEC pioneered   
   >>> the hidden bit.   
   >>   
   >> HFP was even more terrible, it's true.  The Honeywell scheme with   
   >> 36 bits of mantissa, 8 bits of exponent, and 28 bits of useless waste   
   >> was even worse than that.  But ignoring underflow should be a big red flag.   
   >   
   > All of which, I suspect, led to the eventual standardization of how   
   > "floating point" is implemented.   
   >   
   > Of course, if you need /accuracy/, floating point is not acceptable.   
   > For using really large numbers that fixed point can't handle, it will   
   > do until something better comes along   
   >   
   > Imagine if your checking account were maintained using floating point...   
      
   When I worked at Irving Trust (a big Wall Street bank) in the 80s, one   
   of our transaction management systems stored currency amounts as 96   
   bit integer quantities of pennies.   
      
   pt   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)