Halfpenny (Irish decimal coin) Halfpenny (Irish decimal coin) The decimal halfpenny (p) () coin was the smallest denomination of the Irish pound. It was first issued when the Irish currency was decimalised on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971. It was one of three new designs introduced all in bronze and featuring ornamental birds on the reverse. The coin value was weakened by inflation and very few were produced beyond the initial run for 1971. It was removed from circulation and demonetised on 1 January 1987. The main reason that halfpennies were issued was that when shillings were decimalised they were worth five new pence,
Decimal computer also included instructions for packed decimal arithmetic as well as binary integer arithmetic, and binary floating point. It used 8-bit characters and introduced EBCDIC encoding, though ASCII was also supported. The Burroughs B2500 introduced in 1966 also used 8-bit EBCDIC or ASCII characters and could pack two decimal digits per byte, but it did not provide binary arithmetic, making it a decimal architecture. Several microprocessor families offer limited decimal support. For example, the 80x86 family of microprocessors provide instructions to convert one-byte BCD numbers (packed and unpacked) to binary format before or after arithmetic operations . These operations were not