Prime minicomputers had decimal arithmetic in microcode & hardware in the early 80's to support PL/I and COBOL "picture" data types and packed decimal. They al

Prime minicomputers had decimal arithmetic in microcode & hardware in the early 80's to support PL/I and COBOL "picture" data types and packed decimal. They also had sophisticated editing to pictures like ZZZ,ZZ9.99 which would display 1024 as 1,024.00 These instructions were also implemented in PMA, the Prime Macro Assembler, in the OS so that if a machine didn't have these instructions, a UII fault occurred and the instruction was simulated in software. I implemented a lot of the easier instructions in C in the Prime emulator, but for the more complex things like decimal math, I let those fault so the Prime OS would handle them.