Byte using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common into the 1960s. These machines most commonly had memory words of 12, 24, 36, 48 or 60 bits, corresponding to two, four, six, eight or 10 six-bit bytes. In this era, bytes in the instruction stream were often referred to as "syllables", before the term byte became common. The modern "de-facto" standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255 for one byte (2 in power of 8 = 256, where zero signifies number as well). The international standard IEC 80000-13
Women in computing in Canada is likely much lower than this. Although the reasons for the lack of participation of women are multifaceted and are not fully understood, it is accepted that they partly stem from the perceived image of the field, a lack of understanding of what work in the field consists of, and a lack of encouragement. Correspondingly, many institutions (both ones that are independently organized and ones that are funded by the Government of Canada through universities) have come into existence to inform and encourage potential computing students. As well, many universities and other organizations offer gender-specific scholarships in attempts to increase