n. 1. obs. The bits produced by the
CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard, 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 SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see space-cadet keyboard).
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 is rumored that 'bucky bits' were named for Buckminster Fuller
during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually,
'Bucky' was Niklaus Wirth's nickname when *he* was at
Stanford; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the
8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character. This was used in a
number of editors written at Stanford or in its environs (TV-EDIT
and NLS being the best-known). The term spread to MIT and CMU
early and is now in general use.
See double bucky, quadruple bucky.
