Early Floating Point

The first digital computer (Konrad Zuse's Z1 built in 1938) was also the first computer to use floating point representation. Early computers were built to do engineering and scientific calculation so it is no surprise that the invention of floating point happened at the same time. In later years it was realized that computers are very useful things, and not just for calculation. Often floating point was not supported.

Many early minicomputers and microprocessors did not directly support floating point in hardware. For example, Intel processor chips before the 80486 did not directly support floating point. A floating point operation in a program (written in C, say) was compiled into a sequence of bit-manipulation instructions that did the required operations. Computers used for graphics or engineering calculation often had an additional chip that performed floating point operations in hardware.

MIPS processors are very strong on floating point, and have supported the IEEE standard from their (and its) beginning. MIPS are for high-end engineering and graphics workstations and are famous for their fast floating point.