This seems ... not very accurate? My understanding of the history: Intel hired William Kahan (a professor at Stanford, already quite eminent, and familiar wit

This seems ... not very accurate? My understanding of the history: Intel hired William Kahan (a professor at Stanford, already quite eminent, and familiar with FP on existing mainframes) to help get the FP design right, precisely because they hoped to make it a standard. Then other microprocessor companies got an IEEE standardization effort going. Kahan went along to the first meeting, went back to Intel and persuaded them to take part too, and brought a proposal based on the (still in progress) 8087 design to the meeting. There were rival proposals from other companies. The Intel proposal won largely because Intel had thought through the details better than the others. (For instance: The biggest fight was over something called gradual underflow. Intel wanted it, DEC didn't. DEC hired a numerics expert to look into gradual underflow, with the expectation that he would report that it wasn't useful. He looked into it and reported that in fact it was a good idea and ought to be done.) So: (1) it wasn't just "some freshers", it included at least one really big name in the field; (2) the standard and the 8087 were being developed at the same time (and indeed the 8087 didn't quite do what the standard said; later 80x87 generations did); (3) the standard was an inter-company effort and if it ended up being more or less what Intel proposed that was because Intel's proposal was actually better. I have to admit that my summary above is based to some extent on things written by William Kahan, who of course was the guy Intel hired as a consultant to make their floating-point design better. So there may be some bias. If anything above is wrong, I'd be glad of corrections.