Byte explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of "bite" to avoid accidental mutation to "bit". Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term
Byte Information Exchange in 2001. Some members created a new service, based on an open-source version of CoSy, called NLZ (Noise Level Zero) where they continue what remained of the service, with many of the same conferences and topics that were active at the end of Delphi's ownership. Other CoSy-based conferencing systems of the same era still survive including CIX. Byte Information Exchange BYTE Information eXchange (BIX) was an online service created by "BYTE". "BYTE" in the October 1984 issue announced BYTEnet, "a project in computer conferencing", with 200 beta testers who received free service during the "experiment". The magazine formally announced BIX