Also, unit price calculation when shopping — I did this for a while some years ago when I was actively collecting slide rules. And currency conversion — set to

Also, unit price calculation when shopping — I did this for a while some years ago when I was actively collecting slide rules. And currency conversion — set to the current exchange rate it becomes a temporarily-fixed table. I was talking with someone recently about computer floating point and now wonder to what extent the common use of slide rules and log tables influenced its development. I've read a lot of the early computing papers and only recall seeing discussion around whether or not the exponent (or characteristic) should be handled directly (i.e. floating point) or separately/implicitly (fixed point). (And sliding back to rules, the A/B scales are analogous to one bit of float denormalization, although their primary purpose was extracting square roots.)