Recently, I digitized several VHS tapes from the “Bay Area Computer History Perspectives” series of lectures. These lectures were sponsored by Sun Microsystems Inc (alas, now only a ghost image of its former self since the Oracle merger) in the mid-90’s.
They feature big names involved in the history of these topics (ie: original designers, scholars of the time, experts). There were around 25 of these lectures, but I only have 5 of them 🙂 Nevertheless, I shall make them accessible to you, provided Google doesn’t think I am using too much bandwidth.
The first lecture I make available is entitled “Floating-Point— Past Present and Future” (5/9/1995). The lecturers discuss the history of floating point, a lot of technical anecdotes, as well as analysis of the past, present (1995) and future (now I guess) of floating point.
The lecturers are:
- David Bailey
- Joel Boney
- Jerome Coonen
- David Hough
- Harsh Sharangpani
- Pr. William Kahan (Main architect of the IEEE-754 floating point standard)
Don’t miss Pr. Kahan’s appeal for graduate students in the field of floating-point and numerical analysis near the end 🙂
Click on the screenshot to reach the video hosted on PicasaWeb:
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| From Computer History Videos |