Decimal the Roman numerals did, an intermediate base of 5. Notably, the polymath Archimedes (ca. 287–212 BC) invented a decimal positional system in his Sand Reckoner which was based on 10 and later led the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to lament what heights science would have already reached in his days if Archimedes had fully realized the potential of his ingenious discovery. The Hittites hieroglyphs (since 15th century BC), just like the Egyptian and early numerals in Greece, was strictly decimal. Some non-mathematical ancient texts like the Vedas dating back to 1900–1700 BCE make use of decimals and mathematical decimal
Decimal computer extended to wider formats and hence are now slower than using 32-bit or wider BCD 'tricks' to compute in BCD (see ). The x87 FPU has instructions to convert 10-byte (18 decimal digits) packed decimal data, although it then operates on them as floating-point numbers. The Motorola 68000 provided instructions for BCD addition and subtraction; as does the 6502. In the much later 68000 family-derived processors, these instructions were removed when the Coldfire instruction set was defined, and all IBM mainframes also provide BCD integer arithmetic in hardware. The Zilog Z80, Motorola 6800 and its derivatives, together with other 8-bit