You clearly know little of computer hardware. I'm sure you'll claim now you
sold them for a living, which would make this all the more pathetic. While
hardware floating point units (FPU's) were available it was expensive and not
used by those on a tight budget. The smaller computers I worked on (Data
General Nova's) usually didn't have FPU's so I programmed FP software manually.
Even when they did have FP, it was often much faster to work in integer space.
Further, the early FPU's didn't do trig or roots, they still had to be
programmed manually.

Intel floating point wasn't standard until the mid-90's. (Was it the 386 or 486
where all CPU's had FP?) The graphics package I developed at Lotus in '92 was
done in "fixed point" because it had to run quickly on all Windows machines.

Another problem is that some FPU didn't support the mantissa precision or the
exponent range desired. When DEC came out with the VAX they pushed hard to
place one where I worked, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. However,
the native FP format only had limited exponent range (10^38?). We insisted on
more range, so they invented a new format with very high range and precision.
At the time, it was the largest VAX installation - I think there was 6 megabytes
of main memory!


"JAXAshby" wrote in message
...
In the days before
"Floating Point Units" in computers

floating point computers have been around since the 1950's. I have seen early
60's such machines still in use.

accounting computers used integer arithemtic because the calcs were quicker.

If your coding skills were 0.1% of what you claim you could easily use an
interger machine to get as many decimal places as you wanted. It was commonly
done, by freshmen in college.