Fixed point: pretty sure that would not work, I recall the numbers ran over many orders of magnitude. I did waste a ton of time back then looking at whether thi

Fixed point: pretty sure that would not work, I recall the numbers ran over many orders of magnitude. I did waste a ton of time back then looking at whether things like interval arithmetic would help. And double precision was - as I recall - enough to avoid precision problems in the results, it was just unsatisfying because we didn't really have the memory for it. "is the magnitude of the numbers such that this would be impractical..." is maybe the wrong way to look at our problem. Doubling memory to use double precision was an inconvenience, we were trying to squeeze out results with the hardware we had. The elephant in the room was the size of the matrix. Increasing the number of shells in the model - necessary to model heavier nuclei - massively expanded the size of the matrix, and needed a generation for the kind of computer a small research grant can afford to be capable of doing the next set of nuclei. And then it'll be another generation or two before the next set again. And you can ask, but it's a lifetime ago, it's like asking if Napoleon could in some way have avoided defeat at Waterloo - just idle speculation on my part now. I have to laugh at the question in one of the other replies if this had been converted to run on GPU, man, those were 20 years away and some of the machines I coded for didn't have an FPU.