Bozo bit
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The term bozo bit is used in two contexts. Initially a weak copy protection system in 1980s Apple Macintosh Operating System, the term "flipping the bozo bit" was later reused to describe a decision to ignore a person's input.
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[edit] Weak copy protection
In early versions of Apple's Macintosh Operating System, the "bozo bit" was one of the flags in the Finder Information Record (also called the "no copy" flag in some documentation), which described various file attributes. When the bit was set, the file could not be copied. It was called the bozo bit because it was copy protection so weak that only a bozo would think of it, and only a bozo would be deterred by it. After Mac OS Version 4.0, the Finder ignored this bit.[1][2]
[edit] Dismissing a person as not worth listening to
The notion of the bozo bit in an interpersonal sense was adopted by Jim McCarthy in his 1995 book Dynamics of Software Development (ISBN 1-55615-823-8), which presented a series of rules about the political and interpersonal forces that drive software development.[3][4] At the time, it's fair to say that most coders still thought of themselves as technology experts first, team members second. The technical issues facing programmers were sufficiently daunting that just getting code written was commonly considered good enough; McCarthy and other authors (Lister & DeMarco, Constantine, McConnell) were just breaking the news that social issues trump technical ones on almost every project.
McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Chernicoff, Stephen (1987). Macintosh Revealed, Volume One: Unlocking the Toolbox. Indianapolis: Hayden Book Company. ISBN 0672484005.
- ^ Stephen L. Michel (1988). IBM PC and Macintosh networking. Hayden Books. pp. 10. ISBN 0672484056.
- ^ a b Ronald J. Leach (2000). Introduction to software engineering. CRC Press. pp. 61–62. ISBN 0849314453.
- ^ Paul Glen and David H. Maister (2002). Leading geeks. John Wiley and Sons. pp. 37. ISBN 0787961485.
