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:

From Computer History Videos