Decimal computer Decimal computer Decimal computers are computers which can represent numbers and addresses in decimal as well as providing instructions to operate on those numbers and addresses directly in decimal, without conversion to a pure binary representation. Some also had a variable wordlength, which enabled operations on numbers with a large number of digits. Early computers that were exclusively decimal include the ENIAC, IBM NORC, IBM 650, IBM 1620, IBM 7070. In these machines, the basic unit of data was the decimal digit, encoded in one of several schemes, including binary-coded decimal or BCD, bi-quinary, excess-3, and two-out-of-five code. Except for
Decimal the result of a measurement. As measurements are generally afflicted with some measurement error with a known upper bound, the result of a measurement is well represented by a decimal with digits after the decimal mark, as soon as the absolute measurement error is bounded from above by 10. In practice, measurement results are often given with a certain number of digits after the decimal point, which indicate the error bounds. For example, although 0.080 and 0.08 denote the same decimal number, the numeral 0.080 is to suggest a measurement with an error less than 0.001, while the numeral 0.08