What is "bit bucket"

alt. (context informal computing singulare tantum English) The supposed place where bits go when they fall of the end of a register during a shift operation; the great recycle bin in the sky; used to describe lost or missing information n. (context informal computing singulare tantum English) The supposed place where bits go when they fall of the end of a register during a shift operation; the great recycle bin in the sky; used to describe lost or missing information

In computing, the bit bucket is jargon for where lost computerized data has gone, by any means; any data which does not end up where it is supposed to, being lost in transmission, a computer crash, or the like, is said to have gone to the bit bucket — that mysterious place on a computer where lost data goes, as in:

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.

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 1980s). The WORN device is related to the First In Never Out stack and Write Only Memory, in a joke datasheet issued by Signetics in 1972. Atari implemented a WORN device as an Easter Egg in the operating system for the Atari 800, something revealed by Atari BASIC author Bill Wilkinson in a 1988 April Fool's article in Compute! magazine.

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.