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The Russian ruble was the first decimal currency to be used in Europe, dating to 1704, though China had been using a decimal system for at least 2000 years. [2] Elsewhere, the Coinage Act of 1792 introduced decimal currency to the United States, the first English-speaking country to adopt a decimalised currency.
Given a decimal number, it can be split into two pieces of about the same size, each of which is converted to binary, whereupon the first converted piece is multiplied by 10 k and added to the second converted piece, where k is the number of decimal digits in the second, least-significant piece before conversion.
Many non-integral values, such as decimal 0.2, have an infinite place-value representation in binary (.001100110011...) but have a finite place-value in binary-coded decimal (0.0010). Consequently, a system based on binary-coded decimal representations of decimal fractions avoids errors representing and calculating such values.
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, is an invention by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (English: Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic) which uses only the characters 1 and 0, and some remarks on its usefulness. Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern ...
In the 1960s, the term double dabble was also used for a different mental algorithm, used by programmers to convert a binary number to decimal. It is performed by reading the binary number from left to right, doubling if the next bit is zero, and doubling and adding one if the next bit is one. [ 5 ]
Early computers that were exclusively decimal include the ENIAC, IBM NORC, IBM 650, IBM 1620, IBM 7070, UNIVAC Solid State 80.In these machines, the basic unit of data was the decimal digit, encoded in one of several schemes, including binary-coded decimal (BCD), bi-quinary and two-out-of-five code.
The decimal nature of these units and of the device made it easy to calculate the area of a rectangle of land in acres and decimal fractions of an acre. [5] Having difficulties in communicating with German scientists, the Scottish inventor James Watt, in 1783, called for the creation of a global decimal measurement system. [6]
In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 through 9, which combine to form numbers. In an octal system, there are only 8 digits, 0 through 7. That is, the value of an octal "10" is the same as a decimal "8", an octal "20" is a decimal "16", and so on.