If that’s not your way you might be out of luck. If you have trouble internalizing floating point number representations, the Internet is your friend. [Fabian Sanglard] (author of Game Engine ...

Under OS/390, floating ... representation corresponds to bytes of data, with each character occupying 1 bit. The S in byte 1 is the sign bit of the number. If the sign bit is 0, the number is positive ...