misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term
`bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time
hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU
stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the
bit box'. See also {chad box}.

Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the
`parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go to the bit
bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in
bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician
can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.

:bit decay: 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 rot: 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.

There actually are physical processes that produce such effects
(alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip
packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory
unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can
corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and
computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate