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 computing paradigm. Further information can be found in the referenced book by Mars and Poppelbaum. "Bundle Processing" involves sending a fixed number of bits instead of a stream. One of the advantages of this approach is that the precision is improved. To see why, suppose we transmit formula_26 bits. In regular stochastic computing, we can represent a precision of roughly formula_27 different values, because of the variance of the estimate. In bundle processing, we can represent a precision of formula_28. However, bundle processing retains the same robustness to error of regular stochastic processing. "Ergodic Processing" involves sending a stream of