In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables or slab, before the term byte became common. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol ( RFC 791) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. For other uses, see Byte (disambiguation). This article is about the unit of information.

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