IEEE 754–1985 was an industry standard

Industry Standard

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 for representing
floating-point
numbers in computers, officially adopted in 1985 and superseded in 2008 by
IEEE 754-2008. During its 23 years, it was the most widely used format for
floating-point computation. It was implemented in software,
in the form of floating-point libraries, and in
hardware, in the instructions of many
CPUs and FPUs.