bit bucket

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See also: bitbucket and bit-bucket

English[edit]

WOTD – 2 December 2020

Etymology[edit]

A bit bucket (sense 1) from a UNIVAC keypunch.

The noun is derived from bit (“small amount of something; smallest unit of storage in a digital computer, consisting of a binary digit”) +‎ bucket.[1] Bit in this context originally referred to small pieces of paper punched out from paper tape or punch cards (see sense 1), but came to be regarded as the unit of data storage (sense 2).

The verb is derived from the noun.

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

bit bucket (plural bit buckets) (computing)

  1. (historical) A container for holding chad (“small punched-out pieces of paper”) from paper tape or punch cards used with teleprinters, early computers, and other machines; a chad box.
    • 1964, Donald I. Cutler, chapter 6, in Introduction to Computer Programming, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, →OCLC, footnote 1, page 108:
      The lost bits fall into a container called a bit bucket. They are emptied periodically and the collected bits are used for confetti at weddings, parties, and other festive occasions.
  2. (by extension, humorous, slang) The supposed place where bits (binary digits) go when they fall off the end of a register during a shift operation; the notional resting place of lost or missing digital information.
    Synonyms: black hole, byte bucket, memory hole
    • [1972], Fully Encoded, 9046 × N, Random Access Write-Only-Memory: Final Specification (Signetics; 25120)‎[1], [Sunnyvale, Calif.]: Signetics, archived from the original on 16 March 2012, page 1, column 1:
      Applications [...] Overflow register (bit bucket)
      A humorous datasheet for a non-existent product.
    • 1983 May 23, Steve Rosenthal, “Glossary: Rosenthal’s ABCs”, in Maggie Canon, editor, InfoWorld: The Newsweekly for Microcomputer Users, volume 5, number 21, Framingham, Mass.: Popular Computing, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 77, column 1:
      bit bucket – the term for a routine or circuit that accepts binary signals and produces no output. Bit buckets are used for testing and to stand in for routines or circuits that have not been implemented at that particular point.
    • 1985 July 9, Erik Sandberg-Diment, “Personal computing: Parity: An elegantly simple approach to errors”, in The New York Times‎[2], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 27 February 2020, section C, page 4:
      Inside the computer, every time a byte moves from one component to another the hardware performs a parity check by counting the number of ones. [...] But let's say a power surge or some other line noise is picked up by the computer and the byte is scrambled. [...] The errant byte, having failed the parity test, is unceremoniously dumped into the bit bucket, the computer's wastepaper basket.
    • 1990 February 17, W. Paul Blase, “No harmless hacker he”, in The Washington Post‎[3], Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 23 November 2017:
      Fortunately, "RTM" [Robert Tappan Morris] was not out to deliberately cause damage. What would have happened if he had been? Millions of dollars in time and research data gone into the bit-bucket?
    • 1995, Joan C. Horvath, “Spacecraft Autonomy Issues: Present and Future”, in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society‎[4], volume 49, number 6, London: British Interplanetary Society, published 1996, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2 December 2020, page 218, column 1:
      An alternative is for the automated spacecraft to assume that tracking is always available and to have the spacecraft take its data and return it accepting that some fraction of the time communication will in fact not be available. Science data would then go into the "bit bucket." Since current spacecraft are complex and expensive, the latter solution is rarely used (intentionally!) today.
    • 2000, Scott Mann, Ellen L. Mitchell, “Packet Filtering with ipchains”, in Linux System Security: An Administrator’s Guide to Open Source Security Tools (Prentice Hall Series in Computer Networking and Distributed Systems), 2nd edition, Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall PTR, →ISBN, page 438:
      When a packet arrives, the first thing that is done is a cyclic redundancy check [...]. If the CRC does not match the one carried in the frame, then the packet is destroyed (sent to the "Bit Bucket" in Figure 16.1).
    • 2002, Mark Schubin, “A Digital Primer, Schubin-style”, in John Rice, Brian McKernan, editors, Creating Digital Content: Video Production for Web, Broadcast, and Cinema, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, →DOI, →ISBN, page 21:
      In [John] Watkinson's view, all recording should be done in non-specific "bit buckets," with a computer figuring out what got recorded where and when.
    • 2010, Frank O’Brien, “The AGC Hardware”, in John Mason, editor, The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation (Springer–Praxis Books in Space Exploration), Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; Chichester, West Sussex: Praxis Publishing, →ISBN, page 45:
      Shifting the contents of the register one bit to the right places a zero in the leftmost bit location and discards the rightmost bit. Conversely, a left-shift pads the rightmost bit with a zero and the upper, leftmost bit falls off into the "bit bucket".

Alternative forms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

See also[edit]

Verb[edit]

bit bucket (third-person singular simple present bit buckets, present participle bit bucketing, simple past and past participle bit bucketed)

  1. (transitive, computing, humorous, slang) To delete.
    • 1970, 1970 WESCON Technical Papers: Western Electronic Show and Convention: Papers Presented at the Western Electronic Show and Convention in Los Angeles, California, August 25–28, 1970, Los Angeles, Calif.: WESCON, →OCLC, page [unknown], column 1:
      This DSC receives all inputs and performs all computations in synchronization with the online computer; however, the DSC outputs are "bit bucketed."
    • 1996, Lou Grinzo, Software Development, volume 4, San Francisco, Calif.: Miller Freeman, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 30, column 1:
      When the program is pressed into heavier duty it simply can't hold the entire list in memory, so someone else has to "open up the code" and perform major, instead of minor, surgery. This only increases the chances that the program will be bitbucketed rather than updated.
    • 1997 September 30, Matthew N. Dodd, “Anti-spam e-mail addresses”, in comp.os.vms‎[5] (Usenet):
      I think the only good form of email address munging is a plussed email address as I have in this message. While I am not automatically bitbucketing email addressed in this way, it does keep it from hitting my inbox and demanding my immediate attention.

Translations[edit]

to delete — see delete

References[edit]

  1. ^ “bit bucket, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2012; “bit bucket, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading[edit]

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