droppings'. This use may now be mainstream; it has been reported
seen (1993) in directions for a card-based voting machine in
California.

Historical note: One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2)
derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which
cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab
folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was
clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the
stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. There is a
legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for
"Card Hole Aggregate Debris", but this has all the earmarks of
a bogus folk etymology.

:chad box: /n./ A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in
some models a large wastebasket), for collecting the {chad}
(sense 2) that accumulated in {Iron Age} card punches. You had
to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the
chad box. The {bit bucket} was notionally the equivalent device
in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in
another great gray-and-blue box.

:chain: 1. /vi./ [orig. from BASIC's `CHAIN' statement]
To hand off execution to a child or successor without going
through the {OS} command interpreter that invoked it. The state
of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it.
Though this facility used to be common on memory-limited micros and
is still widely supported for backward compatibility, the jargon
usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most Unix programmers
will think of this as an {exec}. Oppose the more modern