Flight recorder
Black Box is the common name used for an airplane’s Flight Data Recorder.
The Flight Data Recorder was invented by an Australian named Dr. David Warren. The original model was red, although these days they are usually orange to make them easier to find. A journalist at the launch described it as a “wonderful black box” to make the point that how it worked was complex and one didn’t really need to know, but that it worked was the important thing.[1]
The phrase has since been commonly used to indicate a device about which nothing is know of its inner workings. As most people who use computers know almost nothing of how they are constructed or work inside, they could be considered black boxes. Lehigh University Professor and Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe used this analogy in naming his book Darwin's Black Box, which deals with the issue of irreducible complexity in biological cells.