John W. Kennedy wrote:
(snip)
>>>> Strange, we got along well with F.P.
>>>> And both machines that we subsequently obtained used
>>>> the original hex floating point (without guard digit, etc).
>>>> It is clear that it was not the problem that you imagine.
>>> It is clear that it wasn't a problem for /you/.
>> It wasn't a problem for anyone in an extensive institution.
> It demonstrably was a problem. IBM spent a fortune fixing what could be
> fixed (note that it had to implement the change on at least seven
> different machine types), the literature was full of problems introduced
> by the S/360, and, in the end, the S/360 and follow-up lines were never
> more than marginally successful in the supercomputing arena.
Maybe, but I doubt this was why. If you consider what a Cray-1 does
with floating point multiply and divide, you will find that IBM, even
before the fix, wasn't all that bad.
Also, IBM had extended precision which has rarely been matched by
others, as far as hardware implemented floating point.
-- glen
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