Why do you need a 387 to run X11R3?

[Peter da Silva]

In article <20203 at nuchat.UUCP> steve at nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia) writes:
> When I cut my teeth, unix systems without FP hardware did the
> emulation thing in library routines that were 10 to mayby
> 100 time slower than hardware, so a program that would spend
> 10% of its time doing FP would slow down by less than ten times.

I'm moderately sure that Version 7 UNIX on the PDP-11 trapped an illegal
instruction and emulated it, just like the 80386 UNIXes do. It might be that
the PDP-11 was just quicker at handling the fault. I'm *sure* that the PDP-11
instructions were easier to parse than the 80386 ones. :->.
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