Today the 6-bit digit has largely disappeared, and the basic unit for computer words is 8-bits, or a byte. This change occurred when computers became more commonly used for text processing, which required 7 or 8 bits to store an ASCII character. The first machine to widely introduce the 8-bit multiple for words was the IBM 360 in the 1960s, and it quickly took over the entire market.
Today the term "word" is rarely used, and instead we simply refer to the number of bits. For instance most common CPUs today use a 32-bit word, but we refer to them as "32-bit processors".
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