[Info-vax] OT: Computing Experience, What brought you to VMS?

[already5chosen at yahoo.com]

On Friday, February 14, 2014 6:10:32 PM UTC+2, Hans Vlems wrote:
> In 1979 I worked as a chemistry student for the University of Technology in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. My job was to connect chromatographs to a DG Nova4 minicomputer under RDOS. I only remember it had a very neat assembly language. 
> 
> The data was to be sent to the B7700 mainframe for further processing. As somebody else here noted, nothing compares to the MCP and its primary development language, Burroughs Extended Algol. After a while a PDP 11/40 running RT-11 (V3 and later V4) replaced the Nova. It served as an RJE station for the B7700 too. It made data transfer to the B7700 a lot easier and took care of ASCII to EBCDIC conversions. In 1982 the Burroughs got replaced by a cluster of VAX 11/750's, soon swapped for heavier VAXes but 32 bits wasn't up to the precision of Burroughs'48 bits and the university shifted to Cyber systems available at other universities (SARA).
> 

???
VAX has 64-bit floating point implemented in hardware. And numeric properties of VAX FP formats are quite reasonable even by today's standards. So, VAX 11/750 is not a fast number cruncher, but has nothing to be ashamed of on precision side of things.

On the other hand, CDC floating point arithmetic had reputation for very bad numeric properties. Was it fixed in Cyber 200 series?