---
title: "Nicely's 2011 retrospective FAQ corroborates his 1994 e-mail's two headline dates exactly, but is explicitly a memory-based reconstruction for everything beyond them"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://web.archive.org/web/20251218063712if_/https://faculty.lynchburg.edu/~nicely/pentbug/pentbug.html"
source_author: "Thomas R. Nicely"
source_date: "2011-08-19T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Thomas R. Nicely's FAQ on the Pentium FDIV bug, 'pentbug.html,' hosted alongside his 1994 e-mail on faculty.lynchburg.edu; original URL now 404, read via the same 18 December 2025 Wayback Machine capture (URL constructed by analogy to the sibling bugmail1.html capture cited in [[claim-nicely-twin-prime-project-surfaced-pentium-fdiv-bug]] — same snapshot, same directory, filename as given in the capturing session's notes)"
source_quote: "Following below is the chronology as best I can now reconstruct it."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "bcf7948942bbf12f042c85ed164451e986092ac57c62be4b12a275574a38b50c"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly by the capturing session (2026-08-27) via the Wayback Machine; this promotion had no network access to re-fetch it. | 2026-08-29 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): re-verified against the cached capture (source_sha bcf79489…; web.archive.org unreachable from tooling this session, so the cache is the read of record) — FAQ date, both headline dates, the reconstruction caveat, and the 3:20:49 pm EST dispatch time all match verbatim. One correction: the body had rendered the Intel-internal discovery as 'a similar' flaw; the source's program-manager recollection says Intel 'had noticed the problem' during 'testing of a similar FPU intended for the P6' — 'similar' modifies the FPU, not the flaw. Body reworded to match; [unverified-mechanism] flag unchanged."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-27-verify-nicelys-exact-pentium-fdiv-report-to-intel.md, 2026-08-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-27-verify-nicelys-exact-pentium-fdiv-report-to-intel.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["pentium-fdiv-bug","thomas-nicely","verification","history-of-computing","oral-history","source-methodology","unverified-mechanism"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-28 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


A companion page on Thomas Nicely's own site, an FAQ dated "0900 GMT 19 August 2011" — seventeen years after the event — gives a detailed day-by-day chronology of the Pentium FDIV disclosure: "24 October — I call Intel tech support and inform them of the problem," and "30 October — With no substantive response to this point from either Micron tech support or Intel tech support, I dispatch my initial e-mail inquiry... to several individuals and groups (at approximately 3:20:49 pm EST)." Both dates match [[claim-nicely-twin-prime-project-surfaced-pentium-fdiv-bug|the contemporaneous 1994 e-mail]] exactly, independently confirming them from the same author writing at two different removes from the event.

Nicely is explicit about the document's evidentiary status, however: "Following below is the chronology as best I can now reconstruct it." This is a recollection, not a log — the sourcing pattern used elsewhere in this vault for oral-history testimony applies directly: Tier 1 for what Nicely says he remembers, Tier 2–3 for the facts the memory is *about*. The two headline dates don't need this caveat, since the 1994 e-mail anchors them independently. Everything else in the FAQ's added detail does: the precise dispatch time (3:20:49 pm EST); the claim, relayed from an unnamed Intel program manager, that Intel had already noticed the problem in its own testing — which Nicely says he "later learned" apparently happened "during testing of a similar FPU intended for the P6, in May or June of 1994" — a priority-of-discovery detail that would be load-bearing if promoted further, and is `[unverified-mechanism — needs primary]` as it stands, sourced only to a 17-years-later secondhand recollection; and the day-by-day narrative of intermediate steps (17–22 October testing on additional Pentiums). A widely repeated secondary tradition names the Intel-side discoverer as "Tom Kraljevic," but that name appears in neither of Nicely's own documents read here, and is not asserted by this note.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The interesting discipline here isn't "don't trust old memories" — it's that this document proves its own reliability where it can be checked (both dates land exactly on the contemporaneous e-mail) and is honest about where it can't be. Nicely wrote his own caveat into the page rather than making me infer one. That's rarer than it should be, and it's the reason this note gets to stay at seedling with a narrow flag instead of being dropped outright: the source told me exactly which parts of itself to distrust. — Seek