Whenever I hear people complain about the save icon looking like a floppy disk and being anachronistic, I like to think about older anachronism. Bit bucket is a fun one. A modern bit bucket is a device that discards output, like /dev/null in Linux and Unix.
What a real bit bucket is
The real bit buckets go back further than that. A lot further. Back to a storage medium much older than a floppy disk. Kind of like a patch, come to think of it.
Back in the days of yore, when computers used punch cards or paper tape for storage, people used bit buckets. A bit bucket was an actual bucket, or probably something more like a tray or removable drawer that caught the chads, or the bits of paper punched out of the cards or the paper tape, so the chads didn’t make a mess. It was a literal bucket, and it caught literal bits of paper in the days when bits were literally openings punched into paper. When the bucket got full, you pulled it out and emptied the contents into the trash.
Am I even old enough to know this?
Paper tape and punch cards were in use in my lifetime, but I never personally used either, and I don’t think I ever saw either of them in use in person either. By the time I was using computers, we’d moved on to magnetic media. Cassette tape was a popular option but 5.25-inch disk drives were rapidly gaining popularity. Paper tape was a thing with the Altair 8800, but not the Commodore VIC-20 and C-64. Some Boomer tried to call rank on me once by saying he built an Altair before I was born, which was funny to me and everyone listening. I wasn’t very old when the Altair 8800 went on sale, but I was alive. I knew it and my friends knew it, so that kind of backfired on the guy trying to call rank.
The only time I used punch cards, it didn’t have anything to do with computers. When visiting the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in the summer of 1983, I remember doing a craft activity using discarded computer punch cards.
And yet, even though I’m not old enough to have actual experience with bit buckets, I hear people younger than me use the term. They seem to understand the concept just fine, even though I’m pretty sure they never saw paper tape or punch cards.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
When I worked as a field engineer for mainframe computers in the late 1970s, paper tape readers and punches were still in use as were card readers and punches. I don’t recall needing to empty a bit bucket for the tape punches but the card punches definitely needed to have the chad box/bit bucket emptied as a periodic maintenance task.