Talk:Microsoft Binary Format

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What is still missing

Important dates:

Done 1975 = First release of Altair BASIC with (now MBF) floating point by Monte Davidoff who had some experience writing floating point routines

1977 = TRS-80 Level II BASIC introduces double precision

1980 = Intel 8087 with (now IEEE) floating point by William Kahan

1985 = IEEE standard published

1987 = QuickBASIC 4.00 (with IEEE floating point)

1991 = Visual Basic 1.0 (maybe not as important)

Conceptual:

Why is IEEE different? Try to motivate existence of NaNs, infs, denormals, different exponent size.

Why was it important for Altair BASIC to have floating point routines?

Why did Microsoft switch to IEEE after the standard was published, rather than sticking to MBF? (Interoperability, speed)

How would using these floating point numbers work from the user's perspective? What would you type, what would display?

What could you do with these floating point numbers?

Did other software support MBF numbers? (MASM comes to mind; Multiplan for the Tandy 200 notably didn't, it used BCD)

Niceties:

A few examples could be enlightening, for example a few simple numbers and the corresponding bytes, a BASIC session demonstrating their use, anything to make it all a bit more grounded. It's a bit abstract as it stands.

Nicer looking diagrams.