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 the 1620, these machines used word addressing. When non-numeric characters were used in these machines, they were encoded as two decimal digits. Other early computers were character oriented, providing instructions for performing arithmetic on character strings of decimal numerals. On these machines, the basic data element was an alphanumeric character, typically encoded in six bits. UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II used word addressing, with 12-character words. IBM examples include IBM 702, IBM 705, the IBM 1400 series, IBM 7010, and the IBM 7080. The IBM System/360, introduced in 1964 to unify IBM's product lines, used per character binary addressing, and