Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator":[1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers.
Early computers, however, with operation times measured in milliseconds, could not solve large, complex problems[2] and thus were seldom plagued with floating-point error.
Today, however, with supercomputer system performance measured in petaflops, floating-point error is a major concern for computational problem solvers.
While extension of precision makes the effects of error less likely or less important, the true accuracy of the results is still unknown.
"[7]The evaluation of interval arithmetic expression may provide a large range of values,[7] and may seriously overestimate the true error boundaries.
[11] Bounded floating point has been criticized as being derivative of Gustafson's work on unums and interval arithmetic.