Kahan declined to bill Intel for the consulting hours spent on the parts of the i8087 design that were transferred into the public IEEE 754 standard

william-kahanieee-754intel-8087standardsprofessional-ethicshistory-of-computing

William Kahan, in his own account of designing the arithmetic that became IEEE 754, states plainly that he did not bill Intel — his paying client — for the consulting hours spent on the specific aspects of the i8087 design that he subsequently carried into the IEEE p754 standards committee. He frames this as a matter of professional ethics rather than generosity: holding a foot in both a commercial engagement and a public standards process, he needed to be certain, "not only in appearance and actuality but above all in my own mind," that he was not using his position to advance one company's commercial interest over its competitors'.

This is the most direct primary evidence for the causal direction of the Kahan/8087/IEEE-754 lineage: it is not merely that the 8087's arithmetic happened to resemble the eventual standard, but that Kahan understood himself, at the time, to be moving specific paid work from a private engagement into a public one — deliberately enough to draw a billing line around it.