Hacker News Reader

The ancient Mesopotamian (Sumerian/Akkadian) system was floating point. The exponent was implied rather than explicitly written though. So 1/120, 1/2, 30, and 1800 were all written the same way.

Modern 'scientific notation' is also floating point.

View on HN

For a century up to the 1970s most engineering calculations were done to three decimal digits with implied-exponent floating point hardware¹.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

Ahh, that explains a lot. Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com