This information should be of no use whatsoever to the average user, and is not even guaranteed to be correct, although corrections are welcome. There is a sign, a mantissa, and an exponent. The leading 1 of the mantissa is suppressed. The mantissa may have up to 3 leading zeros, even when normalised. Denormalised values are valid.
Errors can build up rapidly under the former scheme.
University of Cambridge HPCF, October 1997.