"Shilling" rolls off the tongue better than "12 pence", but England still switched to decimal currency.

So make it 10000 bytes, then. That way it's easier to calculate how long it takes to transmit on the wire, since network speeds have always been 1000-based.

Edit: yes, I'm probably getting the pre-decimalization math wrong above, since I'm likely confusing pre-decimalization pence with post.

IIRC in pre-decimal Britain we used 'pence' a lot in a spoken names for the discrete sub-shilling coins but the names of the coins themselves all had distinct colloquial abbreviations for the amount, notably 'tuppence', 'thruppence' and 'ha'penny' for 2, 3 and half a penny respectively. 'Sixpence' - the half shilling - was pronounced as you might expect. The 3 penny coin (yes!) was colloquially called a 'thruppeny bit'. The pre-decimal abbreviation for a penny was 'd' (denari) rather than 'p' (pence) so you would never say '2p' or '5p' as we would today. Decimal quantities such as 5 or 10 pennies didn't have dedicated coins and there was no special name for these amounts.

In 1971, a cheap paperback book was sold for two shillings and sixpence, which was said as 'two-and-six'. Decimalisation [0] was my first experience of price gouging, when the same paperbacks were suddenly repriced at 15p (~three shillings) instead of the 12.5p which was the decimal equivalent of their old price.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day