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
Word (computer architecture) may use other sizes, and many other sizes have been used historically, including 9, 12, 18, 24, 26, 36, 39, 40, 48, and 60 bits. Several of the earliest computers (and a few modern as well) used binary-coded decimal rather than plain binary, typically having a word size of 10 or 12 decimal digits, and some early decimal computers had no fixed word length at all. The size of a word can sometimes differ from the expected due to backward compatibility with earlier computers. If multiple compatible variations or a family of processors share a common architecture and instruction set