Intel's John Palmer recruited William Kahan as a paid arithmetic consultant for the i8087 (and i432) after hearing him analyze commercial arithmetics at Stanford

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Dr. John Palmer, managing Intel's floating-point effort in the mid-to-late 1970s, had heard William Kahan — then a visiting professor — analyze the anomalies of commercially significant arithmetics at Stanford roughly a decade earlier. Palmer persuaded Intel that it needed a defensible, unified arithmetic standard, so that different Intel products would not silently compute disparate results from the same inputs, and recruited Kahan as a paid consultant to design the arithmetic for two products: the ill-fated i432, and the 8086/8's upcoming i8087 floating-point coprocessor.

Kahan's own account states that he himself initially suggested simply copying DEC VAX's floating-point, which he considered "very good for its time," but that Intel wanted the "best" arithmetic rather than an adequate one — Palmer expected the co-processors to sell to "a market much broader than anyone else contemplated" — and that he and Palmer "put together feasible specifications for that `best' arithmetic." This recruitment is the proximate cause of the whole Kahan/8087/IEEE-754 lineage: the arithmetic Kahan designed under this consulting engagement is the same arithmetic that, via the "K-C-S" draft, became the basis of the IEEE 754 standard.

Palmer does not otherwise appear in this vault; he is currently attested only through this recruitment.