I've always thought the 8087 was a marvelous bit of engineering. I never understood why it didn't get much respect in the software business.

For example, when Microsoft was making Win64, I caught wind that they were not going to save the x87 state during a context switch, which would have made use of the x87 impractical with Win64. I got upset about that, and contacted Microsoft and convinced them to support it.

But the deprecation of the x87 continued, as Microsoft C did not provide an 80 bit real type.

Back in the late 80's, Zortech C/C++ was the first compiler to fully implement NaN in the C math library.

Excel needed the x87 as well as they cared about maintaining the 80-bit precision in some places to get exactly the same recalc results. So they would have fixed it eventually most likely.

I’d agree that the engineering was brilliant (but 68882 gang represent!). Its ISA was so un-x86-like, though, as it was basically an RPN calculator. X86 had devs manipulating registers. X87 had them pushing operands and running ops that implicitly popped them and pushed the result back on the stack.

That’s not better or worse, just different. However, I can imagine devs of the days saying hey, uh, Intel, can we do math the same way we do everything else? (Which TBH is how you’d end up with an opcode for a hardware-accelerated bubble sort or something, because Intel sure does love them some baroque ISAs.)

What do you mean by respect? Here's a layperson's perspective, at least.

Up through the 486 (with its built in x87), the x87 was always a niche product. You had to know about it, need it, buy it, and install it. This is over and on top of buying a PC in the first place. So definitionally, it was relegated it to the peripheries of the industry. Most people didn't even know x87 was a possibility. (I remember distinctly a PC World article having to explain why there was an empty socket next to the 8088 socket in the IBM PC.)

However, in the periphery where it mattered, it gained acceptance within a matter of a few years of being available. Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, and many compilers (including yours, IIRC) had support for x87 early on. I would argue that this is one of the better examples of marginal hardware being appropriately supported.

The other argument I'd make is that (thanks to William Kahan), the 8087 was the first real attempt at IEEE-754 support in hardware. Given that IEEE-754 is still the standard, I'd suggest that x87's place in history is secure. While we may not be executing x87 opcodes, our floating point data is still in a format first used in the x87. (Not the 80-bit type, but do we really care? If the 80-bit type was truly important, I'd have thought that in the intervening 45 years, there'd be a material attempt to bring it back. Instead, what we have are a push towards narrower floating point types used in GPGPU, etc.... fp8 and f16, sure... fp80, not so much.)

x87 should have been killed off. It would have forced lazy game developers to use SSE around the 2005 era.