- Bit bucket
The bit bucket is
jargon for where lostcomputer ized data has gone, by any means; anydata which does not end up where it is supposed to, being lost in transmission, acomputer crash , or the like is said to have gone to the bit bucket — that mysterious place on a computer where lostdocument s go, as in:: "What happened to that important
spreadsheet that I was just editing?": "Oh, it went into the "bit bucket"."
Originally, the bit bucket was the container on teletype machines or
IBM key punch machines into which chad from thepaper tape punch or card punch was deposited; the formal name is "chad box" or (at IBM) "chip box".The term was then generalized into any place where useless bits go including the
trash can orrubbish bin . InUnix ,Linux , andunix-like operating system s, this term is used to refer to/dev/null . InOpenVMS , this term refers to SYS$NULL:. OnUnivac 90/60 operating systems such as VS/9, it was referred to as "*DUMMY". OnDOS and Windows, it is referred to as "NUL".The bit bucket is also used in discussions of bit shift operations. When the width of a given
binary number is fixed, one or more bits are lost when performing a simple shift. These bits are said to have "fallen off" or to have "fallen into the bit bucket".Such a device is sometimes referred to as a "write once read never" or WORN device (named after the
magneto-optical WORM devices used during the 80s), and was indeed implemented as such as an Easter egg in early versions ofAtari BASIC .The WORN is related to the
FINO "First In Never Out" stack and the WOM "Write Only Memory ", implemented bySignetics in 1972.ee also
*
Black hole (networking) (Unix jargon)
*Null route (Cisco jargon)External links
* [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.html Bit Bucket entry from The Jargon File (version 4.4.7)]
* [http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue95/056_1_INSIGHT_ATARI_THAT_MONTH_AGAIN.php A "Write Once Read Never" device available onAtari 8-bit hardware]
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