I once worked in a major police force on a system that had a team of operators transcribing criminal records from microfiche into a database that coud then upload the data to the Police National Computer (PNC). This involved convictions, including fines - some of which were in Guineas, ponds, shilings and pence - down to farthing level. The system captured this data and converted it to decima format in the process. This was quite easy - multiply each unit by the number of pennies in it (252 for a guinea, 240 for a pound, 12 for a shilling etc), add them all together, then divide by 240 and round to two decimal places.
A year or two later, when I had moved on elsewhere, I got a phone call begging me to help by explaining the process to the company who had taken over support - there was nobody in the company that had ever seen "old" money, never mind calculated using it!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
