Byte codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the eight-bit size. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter "B" by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in contrast to the bit, whose IEEE symbol is a lower-case "b". Internationally, the unit "octet", symbol "o",
Byte (magazine) Wilson began writing for byte.com, mostly in the persona of his best-known character Repairman Jack. Byte.com closed in 2013. Byte.com redirects to the website of InformationWeek, a sister technology magazine also published by UBM TechWeb. Byte (magazine) Byte was an American microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. Whereas many magazines from the mid-1980s had been dedicated to the MS-DOS (PC) platform or the Mac, mostly from a business or home user's perspective, "Byte" covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software", and sometimes other computing fields