> Thank goodness the early Pentiums stopped that madness

The idea of a separate co-processor that only did floating point ended with the 387. The 487SX (that was the coprocessor for the 486SX) was actually a 487DX (i.e. a full 486, with an FPU) that took over the system entirely and disabled the 486SX. But that whole scheme was still its own special kind of madness.