Charles Petzold

The computer industry has always been subject to upheavals in standards, with new standards replacing old standards and everyone hoping for backward compatibility.

In the rest of the world, some standards are so entrenched that they take many years to replace. I've recently been reading The Eustace Diamonds, the third of Anthony Trollope's six Palliser Novels (a.k.a., "political novels"). Future fictional Prime Minister Plantagenet Palliser doesn't have much of a role in this novel, but in a humorous passage in Chapter 47 he and his wife throw a party not entirely for social reasons. (I've broken this passage into paragraphs to make it easier to read online.)

Mr. and Mrs. Bonteen ... had been brought there, not, perhaps altogether because they were greatly loved, but in order than the gentleman's services might be made available by Mr. Palliser in reference to some great reform about to be introduced in monetary matters.

Mr. Palliser, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, was intending to alter the value of the penny. Unless the work should be too much for him, and he should die before he had accomplished the self-imposed task, the future penny was to be made, under his auspices, to contain five farthings, and the shilling ten pennies. It was thought that if this could be accomplished, the arithmetic of the whole world might be so simplified that henceforward the name of Palliser would be blessed by all school-boys, clerks, shopkeepers, and financiers. But the difficulties were so great than Mr. Palliser's hair was already grey from toil, and his shoulders bent by the burthen imposed upon them.

Mr. Bonteen, with two private secretaries from the Treasury, was now at Matching to assist Mr. Palliser; — and it was thought that both Mr. and Mrs. Bonteen were near to madness under the pressure of the five-farthing penny. Mr. Bonteen had remarked to many of his political friends that those two extra farthings that could not be made to go into the shilling would put him into his cold grave before the world would know what he had done, — or had rewarded him for it with a handle to his name, and a pension.

That was published in 1873. Great Britain didn't make the switch to decimal coinage until 1971, and by that time the farthing (1/4 of a penny) had ceased to be legal tender. Several pages on the switch to decimal coinage discuss the extensive preparation and publicity campaign required for the change — perhaps even rivaling the compatibility testing done for new versions of Windows.