Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was using a precomputed table of sine values in 3D graphics way before Quake ever hit the scene, and I certainly didn't invent that idea either.
Ah that's useful to know that it was conventional up until then, thanks. It was my first exposure, personally :)
> It is not generally known that to provide seven- decimal accuracy of the sine function, allowing third-order interpolation, only 15 entries are required [*] ...
The following commentary is interesting.
> In spite of these developments in table construction, it turned out two decades ago that the technology was such that table look-up was too slow for arithmetic. The stored-program type of machine displaced this approach. By this method the value of a function, such as sin x, is computed afresh every time. One cannot but wonder how many times such a number has been re-computed in the last decade, and inquire whether technological developments may make tables efficient again.
> Over the years the emphasis in machines has slowly changed from the central processing unit to memory. From the point of view of table look-up, the memory is the central feature of a machine. Indeed the central processing unit is unnecessary.
The [*] is Krawitz. E., "Proc. Industrial Comp. Seminar," IBM, p. 66, 1950. I cannot find this publication with only a simple search.
See also https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&as_yhi=1990&... which finds titles like "A rapid lookup table method for trigonometric functions" (1982) at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.43801210... .