"half-dollar"/"50 cent piece" Was: Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR

[Fred Cisin]

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> US currency is very confusing to me. All the notes seem to be the same
> size and colour, so you can't readily sort them. I mean, I know
> America doesn't believe in helping people when they're sick, but it
> wasn't until I visited that I realised you saved up particular hatred
> for the blind and partially-sighted and went out of your way to make
> life more difficult for them.

USA makes a pretense of accommodating disabilities, but is actually pretty 
hostile to the disabled.
The "new" paper currency, that is s'posedly good for blind people has 
slightly different shades of the same colors.

USA paper currency used to be the size of punchcards.  So, if one were to 
have a LOT of it, you could use the same trays, and counting machines, 
etc.  Do you suppose that Hollerith had a lot of paper currency?
"If Hollerith were alive today, how many birthdays would he have had?" 
requires being aware that 1900 was NOT a leap year.


> You use nicknames for 2 denominations which most of us foreigners
> don't know -- I still don't know which is a "nickel" (which is a metal
> to me) and which is a "dime" (which is a Swedish chocolate-covered
> sweet bar, of which I'm very fond but can't eat because I'm
> overweight).

A "Dime" is one tenth of a dollar.  Or ten cents.  Or $10 worth of drugs.
The coin is 17.91mm diameter, and the smallest coin in circulation.

A "Nickel" is five cents.  or $5 worth of drugs.
The coin is 21.21mm, and is between a penny and a quarter in size.

"Silver Dollar pancakes" are actually larger than a silver dollar, but 
nobody complains.

> And the base unit is a cent, but you call them "pennies", the base
> unit of _my_ old country's currency, and you didn't even put the
> symbol into ASCII.
Pennies used to be copper.  Now, they are mostly zinc, due to copper 
costing more than a penny.  But, they managed to maintain the copper 
color.  During WW2, pennies were briefly made out of steel.
6 decades ago, pennies said "One Cent" on the back, with pictures of 
wheat; then they changed to a picture of the Lincoln memorial, which is at 
the end of Memorial bridge in Washington, DC.


> Very weird.
Our parent country taught us to make currency weird, and we have carried 
on the tradition.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com