Re: Lloyds
Similar problem back in the 1970s with an insurance company. Memory is expensive, so all numeric values were stored in a packed format - that's common, two decimal digits per byte, with a zero and sign (C for positive) in the last byte. To save space we stored everything by chopping off the last byte, so we could store a ten-digit number in 5 bytes instead of 6 - and then had to do some odd pointer-based overlaying of fields (in PL/1) to actually manipulate the numbers). Kids today have no idea of what we went through...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
