In this paper, hardware and software techniques are presented for improving the Throughput (defined as computations per dollar) of computing systems which are oriented towards high-precision floating point computations. The various improvements are referenced to a baseline of the PDP 11/20, the NOVA 1200, and the TI 960A, all 16 bit minicomputers. The most beneficial hardware improvement is the inclusion of a Floating Point Processor, which yields up to 200X Throughput increase over a software floating point package. The inclusion of a cache high speed local memory and the availability of Polish Notation format instructions are shown to provide less than a 5X increase each. The use of 48 bit data paths, numerous registers devoted to various processor functions, instruction look ahead, a system I/O controller which frees the processor from I/O work, and partitioned main memory, result in a combined Throughput increase of 5.9X.