Halfpenny (British decimal coin) Halfpenny (British decimal coin) The British decimal halfpenny (p) coin was introduced in February 1971, at the time of decimalisation, and was worth one two-hundredth of a pound sterling. It was ignored in banking transactions, which were carried out in units of 1p. The decimal halfpenny had the same value as 1.2 pre-decimal pence, and was introduced to enable the prices of some low-value items to be more accurately translated to the new decimal currency. The possibility of setting prices including an odd half penny also made it more practical to retain the pre-decimal sixpence in circulation (with a value
Decimal computer processors, and also the Intel x86 family have special instructions that support conversion to and from BCD. The Psion Organiser I handheld computer’s manufacturer-supplied software implemented its floating point operations in software using BCD entirely. All later Psion models used binary only, rather than BCD. Decimal arithmetic is now becoming more common; for instance, three decimal types with two binary encodings were added to the 2008 IEEE 754r standard, with 7-, 16-, and 34-digit decimal significands. The IBM Power6 processor and the IBM System z9 have implemented these types using the Densely Packed Decimal binary encoding, the first in hardware