I recall seeing a comment by Will Kahan that 80-bit bit was intended as an intermediate step: the intention was to eventually go to 128-bit. Also this was stil

I recall seeing a comment by Will Kahan that 80-bit bit was intended as an intermediate step: the intention was to eventually go to 128-bit. Also this was still early days: up until this point, fast floating point was the domain of much more expensive machines. No one had any idea what would be useful in consumer level hardware.