You Get What You Pay for

摘要

We recently received a new Microway WhisperStation. Never heard of Microway? This small, woman-owned company is widely credited with popularizing numeric coprocessors. Still doesn't ring a bell? Back in the early days of the IBM PC, Intel's 8086 CPUs could not perform floating point math calculations. That capability, crucial for most CAD applications, required the addition of an Intel 8087 numeric coprocessor. In 1982, Microway began to develop software for the Intel 8087 - and a year later introduced its own, faster version of the coprocessor.