Today I learned about excess-3 encoding, from footnote 10 in the linked article. Its interesting to see how clearly the early computers were intended to work with decimal while retaining the simplicity brought by using the two signal levels of binary. Footnote reproduced here:

The computer uses excess-three encoding for digits, adding 3 to the value before converting to binary. For example, 6 is represented as binary 1001. The advantage of this encoding is that flipping the bits yields the 9's-complement decimal value, simplifying subtraction. For example, flipping the bits of 6 yields binary 0110, which is 3 in excess-3 notation. Excess-3 representation also handles carries correctly; if you add two numbers that sum to 10, the excess-3 values will sum to 16, causing a binary carry. To convert the sum to excess-3, The value 3 must be added (if a carry) or subtracted (if no carry).

To see how addition works with excess-3, 2 + 4 in excess-3 is binary 0101 + 0111 = 1100. Subtracting 3 yields 1001, which is 6 in excess-3. But 2 + 9 is binary 0101 + 1100 = 10001, generating a carry out of the 4 bit value. Adding 3 yields 0100, which is 1 in excess-3. Considering the carry-out, this is the desired result of 11.