oh cool
I hope measuring from 1980 instead of 1978 won't make too much of a difference
Discussion
When I was younger I had to design different floating point operations using microcode.
And that was fun. That's the layer where you decide where the actual "physical" 1s and 0s go and its just one layer above talking voltages...
The fun part is that there are all sorts of tricks to optimize the number of tics it takes to do some more complicated assembly instruction.