On 17/02/2021 09:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 16/02/2021 17:18, Jethro_uk wrote:
On Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:58:24 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 16/02/2021 14:52, Roger Hayter wrote:
Of course, unlike later bits of shopping metrication which were
bitterly contested, it could have been of no interest whatever to the
Common Market what we divided our Pounds into.Â* But I remember it being
sold as a pro-European move, as I remember Powell, ever the
opportunist, opposing it on the same grounds

I understood it to be far more about computerization of the banking and
financial system

That's an odd one. Surely computers are uniquely equipped to deal with
non-decimal systems ?

of course but its massively more complicated to for example work out
what 3.5% per annum of £1237 17'3½d is compounded as a monthly interest,
in £sd terms.

The answer was to represent all values in either binary coded decimal or
really in floating point, as far as banks went. Display in pounds and
whole pence was simply presentation.

But where it really made a difference was shop sized cash registers and
small computers like pocket calculators

snip

Banks never use floating point.

They get really upset if you take a million pounds, take off a
percentage, and the resulting numbers don't add up to a million by a penny.

Andy