Much earlier than that. The IBM/360 architecture had instructions for doing arithmetic with BCD numbers (packed and zoned decimal formats) in the mid-1960s. I t

Much earlier than that. The IBM/360 architecture had instructions for doing arithmetic with BCD numbers (packed and zoned decimal formats) in the mid-1960s. I think earlier IBM architectures had them too. COBOL natively supports that datatype, so did PL/I. After all, the biggest customers for mainframes were banks, insurance companies, the IRS, etc. that dealt with large sums of money and needed their accounts to be accurate to the nearest cent. Dealing with very large integer values is a problem that was solved a long, long time ago.