for them). The notion long favored among hackers that cosmic
rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth;
see the {cosmic rays} entry for details.

The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is
the effect, bit rot the notional cause.

:bit twiddling: n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see
{tune}) 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-paired keyboard: 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. In
order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than
it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the
same basic bit pattern on one key.

Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: