The IBM System/360 (1964) had instructions to convert a character string to packed decimal, and to convert packed decimal to binary. This was motivated by the l

The IBM System/360 (1964) had instructions to convert a character string to packed decimal, and to convert packed decimal to binary. This was motivated by the large amount of punch-card data that was handled back then, with all the numbers in decimal. But I guess Intel figured that string conversion wasn't common enough in modern systems to merit adding it to the instruction set.