h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It was the complexity of the conversion that lead to the UKs first IT skills crisis and thus to the market for contract programmers.

Just thought you should know these things....

<>====uuu====<

I always wondered how cash registers in the UK handled the complex functions of adding up purchases and determining change due under the old system.

We didn't use tills that added up. I used to work in a shop in the early 1960s and we usually added up in our heads and rang up the total on the till. Neither did the till work out the change, I was taught to take change out of the till working from the amount rung up to the amount tendered. Sometime, if we had time, we could write the amounts down and add them up but this very rarely happened and we became experts at mental arithmetic, a vanishing talent.