Heh. I was implementing 128-bit floats in software, for Cray, in about 1980. They didn't do it because they *wanted* to make the Cray boxes look like pigs <wink>. A 128-bit float type is simply necessary for some scientific work: not all problems are well-conditioned, and the "extra" bits can vanish fast. Went thru the same bit at KSR. Just yesterday Konrad Hinsen was worrying on c.l.py that his scripts that took 2 hours using native floats zoomed to 5 days when he started using GMP's arbitrary-precision float type *just* to get 100 bits of precision. When KSR died, the KSR-3 on the drawing board had 128-bit registers. I was never quite sure why the founders thought that would be a killer selling point, but it wasn't for floats. Down in the trenches we thought it would be mondo cool to have an address space so large that for the rest of our lives we'd never need to bother calling free() again <0.8 wink>.