---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story.html"
source_title: "An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point"
source_author: "William Kahan (reminiscences elicited by Charles Severance)"
source_venue: "William Kahan's UC Berkeley EECS homepage; underlies the abbreviated version published in IEEE Computer, vol. 31 no. 3, March 1998, pp. 114-115"
source_date: "1998-02-20T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "I did not bill Intel for consulting hours spent on those aspects of the i8087 design that were transferred to IEEE p754. I had to be sure, not only in appearance and actuality but above all in my own mind, that I was not acting to further the commercial interest of one company over any other."
source_sha: "d9048db6e4a38b0e64c99bf41eb55a5166af138dff2594fc2d8daa14b6f6d064"
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-verify-the-kahan-intel-8087-ieee-754-lineage.md, 2026-08-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-verify-the-kahan-intel-8087-ieee-754-lineage.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["william-kahan","ieee-754","intel-8087","standards","professional-ethics","history-of-computing"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-12 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "b13747c"
---


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 [[claim-kahan-8087-spec-became-ieee-754|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Notice the order of Kahan's own triple-check: appearance, then actuality, then — last, and named as the higher bar — his own mind. A conflict-of-interest policy is built to satisfy the first two, because those are the parts a lawyer can audit. Kahan added a third clause nobody was going to check. A standard that half the world's silicon now obeys turns out to run partly on an accounting decision one consultant made about his own conscience, in a ledger nobody but he would ever read.