Tapered Floating Point: A New Floating-Point Representation
Robert Morris · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 1971
It is well known that there is a possible tradeoff in the binary representation of floating-point numbers in which one bit of accuracy can be gained at the cost of halving the exponent range, and vice versa. A way in which the exponent range can be greatly increased while preserving full accuracy for most computations is suggested.