Coins of Australia Coins of Australia Australian coins refers to the coins which are or were in use as Australian currency. During the early days of the colonies that formed Australia, foreign currency was used, but in 1910, a decade after federation, Australian coins were introduced. Australia used pounds, shillings and pence until 1966, when it adopted the decimal system with the Australian dollar divided into 100 cents. With the exception of the first Proclamation Coinage and the holey dollars, all Australian coins remain legal tender despite being withdrawn from circulation. For many years after the first Australian colony, New South Wales, was
Decimal computer extended to wider formats and hence are now slower than using 32-bit or wider BCD 'tricks' to compute in BCD (see ). The x87 FPU has instructions to convert 10-byte (18 decimal digits) packed decimal data, although it then operates on them as floating-point numbers. The Motorola 68000 provided instructions for BCD addition and subtraction; as does the 6502. In the much later 68000 family-derived processors, these instructions were removed when the Coldfire instruction set was defined, and all IBM mainframes also provide BCD integer arithmetic in hardware. The Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800 and its derivatives, together with other 8-bit