I've got a old one hundred dollars bill with this mark. Can you tell from which country or bank this comes from? is a very interesting and neat bill.

With regard to historical pricing and inflation, here's something which offers RPI and CPI for Britain, purportedly from 1209 !!! It also gives lots of other useful info, and is well worth a look. I have not yet properly looked at it, let alone trying to compare it with "Chronicon Preciosum", but ...

I was happy to read about Marc Isambard Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the last two issues. The father should be well known to readers of The E-Sylum, as he was briefly Chief Engineer of the City of New York, and associated with the Castorland colony. Both were mentioned in my article on the David D’Angers medal of Marc Isambard Brunel in the February 2010 issue of the MCA Advisory.

Ken Berger’s anecdotes about RADM Grace Hopper prompted me to review my own Navy log, and I discovered that I erred when I said she was in her 80s when I served with her in the Washington Navy Yard from 1984 until her retirement on board the USS Constitution in Philadelphia on August 14, 1986. At that time, she was the oldest active-duty officer in the Navy at the age of ‘only” 79 years, 8 months, and 5 days.

While popularly known for her computer “bug” and her 11.80-inch-long copper wire souvenirs called “nanoseconds,” she was more respectfully acclaimed as “Grandma COBOL.” She was the co-developer of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1959. That language was so complex (in its day) that it was deemed by many to be impossible ever to develop a compiler for it. Undeterred, Grandma COBOL went on to develop a successful COBOL compiler.

COBOL was so pervasive in business computing that, in 1986 when she retired, my Directorate at the Navy Regional Data Automation Center (NARDAC) was still managing fourteen individual minicomputers, each of which ran a single application (for example, calculating and printing all the Navy paychecks for the National Capitol Region) and all of which were still running in COBOL!