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
Byte (magazine) resumed publication after a few years of interruption. The Arabic edition also ended abruptly. Many of "Byte"'s columnists migrated their writing to personal web sites. One was science fiction author Jerry Pournelle's weblog "The View From Chaos Manor" derived from a long-standing column in "Byte", describing computers from a power user's point of view. After the closure of "Byte" magazine, Pournelle's column continued to be published in the Turkish editions of "PC World", which was soon renamed as "PC Life" in Turkey. "Byte Japan", with the name licensed from McGraw Hill, was the leading computer magazine in Japan, Published by