BCD
(chemical engineering)
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
BCD
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BCD
(Binary Coded Decimal) The storage of numbers in which each decimal digit is converted into a binary number and stored in a single 8-bit byte. For example, a 12-digit decimal number would be represented as 12 bytes. BCD uses more storage for numbers than binary encoding (see below). Prior to 8-bit bytes in the 1960s, BCD encoding used 6-bit characters. See binary numbers and byte. |
| BCD and Binary |
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| The BCD method codes each decimal digit in binary and stores it in its own byte. The binary method converts the entire decimal number into a binary number. In the binary example above, the 1 in the left byte is the ninth bit starting from the rightmost bit in the right byte (1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512-1024-2048-4096-8192-16384-32768). |
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| How Numbers Are Stored |
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| BCD is one of four primary ways numbers are stored in the computer. |
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