WhatIs

/bit'blit/

n. [from BLT, q.v.]

1. Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement to do the Right Thing in the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky).

2. Synonym for blit or BLT.

Both uses are borderline techspeak.

/bit twid-liŋ/

n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible.

2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal.

3. Approx. syn. for bit bashing; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.

/bit rät/

n. Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if 'nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled.

/bit-pered kē-ˌbȯrd/

n. obs. (alt. 'bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was pressed.

/bit di-ˈkā/

n. See bit rot. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay.

See also computron, quantum bogodynamics.

/bit bə-kət/

n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have 'gone to the bit bucket'. On UNIX, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as 'the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'.

/bit bashiŋ/

n. (alt. 'bit diddling' or bit twiddling) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of bit, flag, nybble, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see bitblt), and assembler/compiler code generation.

/bit baŋ/

n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the wannabees.

Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO.

/bit/

[ from the mainstream meaning and Binary digIT ]

n. 1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable.

2. [techspeak] A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false or 0 and 1.

3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.)

/ˈbaɪɔs/ or /'baɪoʊs/

History of BIOS: Bootstrapping the Computer

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is a critical component of a computer's firmware that initializes hardware components during the boot process. The history of BIOS dates back to the early days of personal computing in the 1970s when it was first developed for the IBM PC. Originally, BIOS was stored on a ROM (Read-Only Memory) chip, ensuring its availability and functionality every time the computer powered on.