I learned how floating point arithmetic worked by disassembling the ROMs on my Commodore PET as a child. There I learned that they used a Taylor series expansio

I learned how floating point arithmetic worked by disassembling the ROMs on my Commodore PET as a child. There I learned that they used a Taylor series expansion to compute the values of transcendental functions. It was fun to see the coefficients in the source. When I wrote a set of 80 bit IEEE Temporary Real floating point functions for the 6502, I used an early version of Maple running on a VAX that I, ahem, "acquired" an account for running at a local university to compute the coefficients for my functions. I grew up with this code; it's so awesome to finally see the source!