John Palmer

Dr. John Palmer managed Intel's floating-point effort in the late 1970s. He recruited William Kahan — whom he had heard analyze the flaws of commercially significant arithmetics as a visiting professor at Stanford roughly a decade earlier — as a paid consultant to design the arithmetic for the i432 processor and the 8086 family's i8087 coprocessor.

Palmer matters to this vault as the proximate cause of the whole IEEE 754 lineage: without his decision that Intel needed a defensible, unified arithmetic standard, the design work that became the IEEE 754 standard never leaves the company.

References

• claim-palmer-recruited-kahan-as-consultant-for-i8087-arithmetic — the recruitment itself, in Kahan's own words.