Black box

Sponsorship the way you would do it

A black box is a system where we have a well defined understanding of its inputs and output characteristics, but no idea what's going on inside.

There are several main senses:

In electronics, a sealed piece of replaceable equipment - see Line replaceable unit.
In aircraft, the flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, that record aircraft and pilot behavior in order to analyze accidents are called "black boxes" by the news media. (Even though they are now bright orange in colour, they were black when originally introduced.)
In philosophy and mathematics - see black box theory.
Black Box is the name of a board and computer game.
Black Box was a music group popular in the early 1990s
Phone Phreaking, the Black Box was a particular kind of device built by phone phreaks during the 1960s and 1970s to defeat toll charges.
In computer programming and software engineering, black box testing is used to check that the output of a program is as expected given certain inputs. The term black box is used because the actual program being executed is not examined.

Also See

Black Box, the theatrical term.
Blackbox - a window manager that works on X Window System platforms.

This is a disambiguation page; that is, one that points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link to point to the appropriate specific page.