Decimal Day three of the six new coins. Small booklets were made available containing some or all of the new denominations. The old halfpenny was withdrawn from circulation on 31 July 1969, and the half-crown (2s 6d) followed on 31 December to ease the transition. (The farthing had last been minted in 1956 and had ceased to be legal tender in 1960.) There was a substantial publicity campaign in the weeks before Decimalisation Day, including a song by Max Bygraves called "Decimalisation". The BBC broadcast a series of five-minute programmes, "Decimal Five", to which The Scaffold contributed some specially written tunes. ITV
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