Mode bit
A
flag, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation.
The connotations are different from
flag bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom explicitly read, and seldom change over the lifetime of an ordinary program.
The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the
IBM 360.
Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction set.
[
Jargon File]
