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
Stochastic computing stochastic computing is robust against noise; if a few bits in a stream are flipped, those errors will have no significant impact on the solution. Furthermore, stochastic computing elements can tolerate skew in the arrival time of the inputs. Circuits work properly even when the inputs are misaligned temporally. As a result, stochastic systems can be designed to work with inexpensive locally generated clocks instead of using a global clock and an expensive clock distribution network. Finally, stochastic computing provides an estimate of the solution that grows more accurate as we extend the bit stream. In particular, it provides a