Uh oh. This makes me think my younger colleagues don't know what I'm talking about at least half the time, but never ask...

It never even registered with me until you asked, but that makes bitbucket the worst possible name, maybe next to "trashfire.com", for a service that is supposed to store data.

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_bucket

So as a metaphor I guess it's roughly equivalent to /dev/null or the recycling bin? Yeah, probably not the best name for a mission-critical immutable data store, unless it was meant to be ironic.

Well, it is Atlassian, so that kind of works.

More like kind of bugs out.

Its not like "git" or "mercurial" are all that inviting either.

Of course (oh, how it makes me feel old too) that fantastic name is already registered and parked, and available for resale at the nice, nice price of $4,395 from HugeDomains. :(

I think there is a German ISP called SNAFU, so there's that.

Anyway, I call dibs on trainwreck.io!

Hahaha trashfire.com is an excellent name for a saas, love it.

It’s an old term for /dev/null et al. (The New Hacker’s Dictionary has a comic featuring a literal one in the background of the water-powered computer: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.html)

I assume this is where the company got their name from; I remember thinking when I encountered them that it was a bit strange to name your company after something that implied unreliability and lost data.

TNHD is how shub-Internet.ims.disa.mil was created, and actually did live in the basement of the Pentagon.

Well, the Mezzanine level, actually. Room MF-648 or something like that, IIRC.

It wasn’t until 1995 that I registered shub-internet.org and some other THND-related .org domains.

> I've actually never heard bit bucket used like this before. Is that the origin of the name for bitbucket.com?

Yes, it's ancient as far as computer jargon goes. The etymology is pretty grounded in the real world though! It's where chads that were discarded by card punching machines go.

Chad has a very different meaning to me. Good lord I've never felt more like a baby millennial

Fascinating info, thanks :)

Haha, my brain seems to still bit-flip on the term "chad" nowadays. Before the current usage, the biggest thing was the "hanging chad" in Florida in a US presidential election.

As a mid-aged Gen-X, 'Chad' when I was growing up was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here#:~:text=Chad

Then I did Comp. Sci. at school, and I learned that the whole Chads from punched cards was a thing, so my association with the word changed.

re: Bit Bucket. Again due to my age I guess, it was always a term for where thrown-away data went, along with 'Into the Ether' for lost network packets.

I love learning the etymology of jargon. For example, loops were once physically looped paper.

Yes! It's the bucket you toss the useless bits of chad! Think of teletypes and what to do with the chads of paper.

I don't imagine you ever imagined the cross-polination of hanging-chads with bitbucket.com!

There's an updated version for the modern app developer, https://devnull-as-a-service.com/