- B — probably a contraction of "BCPL", reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7. Or, named after Bon.
- biff — named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on the 15th August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to a certain Heidi Stettner. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed.
- bit — first used by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit". He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had used the word in a Bell Labs memo of 9 January 1947.
- Bon — created by Ken Thompson and named either after his wife Bonnie, or else after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas" (a reference to the Tibetan native religion Bön).
- booting or bootstrapping — from the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", originally used as a metaphor for any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. Used in computing due to the apparent paradox that a computer must run code to load anything into memory, but code cannot be run until it is loaded.
- bug — often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. However, use of the word 'bug' to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks.
- byte — coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. It was coined by mutating the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit.
Read more about this topic: List Of Computer Term Etymologies