Not many. I did go ahead and purchase his book. It's... kind of a weird read, honestly. Useful - it clarified some things about the proposed Unum format - but also written very casually, like "pop science" prose, which seems inappropriate - who would buy a book about a floating-point number format if they didn't want a dry, boring book full of technical details? Some of the arguments are made as though to convince a non-technical audience - maybe Gustafson wants managers (or former engineers who haven't worked as engineers for a long time) to read his book, but I think it would have been better to publish all of the details without any fluff, first.

Also worth noting that half of the book is about the "ubox" method for solving optimization problems - also cool, but may be overkill if you are just interested in the numeric format itself. Personally, I've been working on an implementation of the format that I can toy around with - I have no real interest in learning a lot about the cool algorithms I could do with it until I can show myself that it works for basic arithmetic, etc, as well as the author claims.

Gustafson also makes the code available (I think [here](https://www.crcpress.com/The-End-of-Error-Unum-Computing/Gus...). It's Mathematica code... there is a free viewer for that format (if you don't have Mathematica) which can print out a PDF with richly formatted equations.

Also, Googling for that link led me to this [Python implementation someone whipped up](https://github.com/jrmuizel/pyunum).

Some would call it an enjoyable read. Definitely not the typical stodgy format of papers, but addressing the reader and throwing a few jokes in doesn't hurt the technical validity. He wrote it so it could be accessible and defends it as such in the prologue. Dry papers get passed over these days, I'm afraid.

That's true - and I did enjoy it. I'm biased - still in university, so I'm used to dry papers. The lack of stodginess wouldn't have bothered me if I had been able to obtain key details on the format for free. I was a little annoyed to have to buy a 50-dollar paperback book instead of just downloading a short paper via the college library, though - I was convinced of the potential benefits of the format by one of Gustafson's earlier presentations and want to help in the efforts towards software/hardware implementations, so I didn't need enhanced accessibility to remain interested in the book.

If you are not in HPC, you may not have heard about Gustafson's law, but it is a legit and important thing... His 1988 paper is still a very worthy read (And winner of the first Gordon Bell award for showing a 1000x speedup, which was previously thought impossible)

Fair enough: a pity he doesn't explain what it is though.

Wikipedia is your friend... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

Would be happy to explain it further, but about to get on a flight.