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
Type-in program such as "Byte" and "Popular Computing" printed them less frequently, often as a test program to illustrate a technical topic covered in the magazine rather than an application for general use. Consumer-oriented publications such as "Compute!" and "Family Computing" ran several each issue. The programs were sometimes specific to a given home computer and sometimes compatible with several computers. Entirely platform-specific magazines such as "Compute!'s Gazette" (Commodore) and "Antic" (Atari), since they only had to print one version of each program, were able to print more, longer listings. Although type in programs were usually copyrighted, like the many games in