Related:

• dread high-bit disease n. A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals (including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on.
  This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices....
• high bit: [from `high-order bit'] n. 1. The most significant bit in a byte.
  2. By extension, the most significant part of something other than a data byte...
• high bit n. [from `high-order bit'] 1. The most significant bit in a byte.
  2. [common] By extension, the most significant part of something other than a data byte...
• cretinous: /kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/ adj. Wrong; stupid
  non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people....
• hobbit: n. 1. The High Order Bit of a byte; same as the {meta bit} or {high bit}.
  2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers....
• PDP-10: [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that made timesharing real.
  It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU....
• 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....
• bit bang: n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the appropriate times.
  The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte....
• cretinous /kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/ adj. Wrong
  stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people....