Decimal Day use pennies or threepenny pieces, to pay them in multiples of 6d (p, the lowest common multiple of the two systems). Bus companies (at that time many state-owned by the National Bus Company) were another exception, going decimal on Sunday 21 February. Decimal Day itself went smoothly. Criticisms included the small size of the new halfpenny coin and the fact that some traders had taken advantage of the transition to raise prices. Some used new pennies as sixpences in vending machines. After 15 February, shops continued to accept payment in old coins, but always issued change in new coins. The
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