Bit bucket

History

Originally, the bit bucket was the container on teletype machines or IBM key punch machines into which chad from the paper 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, a useful computing concept known as the null device. The term bit bucket is also used in discussions of bit shift operations.

The bit bucket is related to the first in never out buffer and write-only memory, in a joke datasheet issued by Signetics in 1972.

In a 1988 April Fool's article in Compute! magazine, Atari BASIC author Bill Wilkinson presented a POKE that implemented what he called a "WORN" (Write Once, Read Never) device, "a close relative of the WORM".

In programming languages the term is used to denote a bitstream which does not consume any computer resources, such as CPU or memory, by discarding any data "written" to it. In .NET Framework-based languages, it is the System.IO.Stream.Null.

References

References

1. (1978). "MCS-86 Assembler Operating Instructions For ISIS-II Users". [[Intel Corporation]].
2. (January 1983). "CP/M-86 – Operating System – Programmer's Guide". [[Digital Research]].
3. (1985-07-09). "Parity: An Elegantly Simple Approach to Errors". [[The New York Times]].
4. (1990-02-17). "No Harmless Hacker He". [[The Washington Post]].
5. (1964). "Introduction to Computer Programming<!--". [[Prentice-Hall]].
6. (2010-06-25). "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation". [[Springer Science & Business Media]].
7. (1972). "Signetics 25120 Fully Encoded, 9046xN, Random Access Write-Only-Memory". [[Signetics]].
8. "Demonstrate the use of the Null stream as a bit bucket: Stream Null « File Stream « C# / C Sharp". Demo Source and Support.
9. (April 1988). "That month again".