> fixed point was very important back in the days when CPUs didn't have dedicated floating point instructions That's a misconception, before widespread dedicat

> fixed point was very important back in the days when CPUs didn't have dedicated floating point instructions That's a misconception, before widespread dedicated hardware (eg on-chip 80x87) there was software-emulated floating point arithmetic (eg Microsoft Binary Format) for general use. In contrast, fixed point solutions are very narrow purposed, that is, you choose a specific binary representation format so your specific range of values would fit with acceptable precision.