8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems

While I was at Mark Williams back in the day, the engineers wrote 8087 emulation floating point for the Mark Williams 8086 compiler. This involved some quality time with the Volume 2 of Knuth in the log division section.

The article states that the 8087 was an expensive add-on.

Was this price point a deliberate market differentiator, or was there some special sauce within FPU that was otherwise difficult to attain?

Fun trivia: Intel's PCI vendor ID is 8086.

The interesting thing about the 8087 is that the co-processor interface was kind of generic. In theory you could have had things beyond just an FPU, but I don't know if much was ever done using it.

https://github.com/howerj/muxleq (subleq and muxleq). Look at the EForth code on how a small FP it's implemented. Also, learn about Forth, it's dumb easy to understand.