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The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction

50 points • by pwg • today at 4:20 PM • 7 comments • view on HN

Comments

WalterBright • today at 6:34 PM

I always thought the 8087 was way cool, but it never really caught on. Early versions of Win32 did not save the 8087 registers on a context switch. I called up some people at Microsoft to please not destroy the 8087, and they relented and preserved the registers.

I've always been proud to support the 8087 with my compilers, and am baffled why the numerics people ignore it.

kens • today at 5:05 PM

Author here with another 8087 article. What part of the 8087 should I look at next?

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