The Hewlett-Packard 2114, 2115, and 2116 used a format with the leftmost 16 bits being the mantissa stored in two’s complement format, followed by another 16-bit field which had the leftmost 8 bits as an extension of the mantissa (making the mantissa 24 bits long), and the rightmost 8 bits representing the exponent. However, in an interesting twist, the exponent was stored in sign-magnitude format with the sign bit on the far right! Write down the bit pattern assuming this format. No hidden 1 is used. Comment on how the range and accuracy of this 32-bit pattern compares to the single precision IEEE 754 standard.

In the IEEE 754 floating point standard the exponent is stored in "bias" (also known as "Excess-N") format. This approach was selected because we want an all-zero pattern to be as close to zero as possible. Because of the use of a hidden 1, if we were to represent the exponent in two's complement format an all-zero pattern would actually be the number 1! (Remember, anything raised to the zeroth power is 1, so 1.0⁰ = 1.) There are many other aspects of the IEEE 754 standard that exist in order to help hardware floating point units work more quickly. However, in many older machines floating point calculations were handled in software, and therefore other formats were used. The following table shows decimal numbers.

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a. b. -1.5625 x 10-1¹ 9.356875 x 10²