Re: Another End of an Era moment
I wish I had more than vague memories! Vague memory 1 is that the floating point was quite difficult and expensive to implement; I wish I'd taken note because I recall reading not that long ago that the person responsible was insistent that she wasn't going to take short-cuts with it, though that may have been with specific reference to some arcane instruction for manipulating matrices. I also vaguely recall reading about the various formats many years ago and decided to stick with integers (which was fine as I was mostly writing systems stuff and "glueware" rather than civil engineering stuff).
Vague memory no. 2 was something to do with the byte order being different (or was it the bits within a byte?) but I suspect it was explained in a suitably ambiguous manner that I didn't quite grasp what was different about it.
Of course it also did BCD for people who liked that sort of thing.