/buh'kee bits/ 1. Obsolete. The bits produced by the CONTROL
and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard (
octal 200 and 400
respectively), resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set.
The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and
separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a
12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as
2. By extension, bits associated with "extra" shift keys on
any keyboard, e.g. the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option
keys on a Macintosh.
It has long been rumored that "bucky bits" were named after
Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at
Stanford. Actually, bucky bits were invented by Niklaus Wirth
when *he* was at Stanford in 1964--65; he first suggested the
idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7 bit
ASCII character. It seems that, unknown to Wirth, certain
Stanford hackers had privately nicknamed him "Bucky" after a
prominent portion of his dental anatomy, and this nickname
transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a
number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably
TV-EDIT and NLS.
The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general
use. Ironically, Wirth himself remained unaware of its
derivation for nearly 30 years, until
GLS dug up this
(2001-06-22)