History
In 1971, Tien Chi Chen and Dr. Irving T. Ho devised a lossless prefix code (now known as Chen–Ho encoding) which packed three decimal digits into 10 binary bits using a scheme which allowed compression from or expansion to BCD with only two or three gate delays in hardware. Densely packed decimal is a refinement of this, by Mike Cowlishaw, which was incorporated into the IEEE 754-2008 standard for decimal floating-point.
Read more about this topic: Densely Packed Decimal
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