Do we know anything about the origin of the term bucket list?  Specifically I’d like to know if we have any evidence that the bucket in question is the one you kick when you are dying, but any information about its origin I would find helpful.

Merriam-Webster online offers:

from the phrase kick the bucket (to die)
First Known Use: 2006

Scripted by Justin Zackham, “The Bucket List” refers to a wish list that two terminally ill men try to fulfill before each kicks the bucket. After they break out of a cancer ward, they head off on a road trip with an itinerary that includes racing cars, eating giant plates of caviar and slinging poker chips in Monte Carlo.
—“‘Bucket’ Brigade,” Daily Variety, June 29, 2006

from wordspy

It is also an earlier computing term:

High performance networking, IV: proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.4 Fourth International Conference on High Performance Networking, Liège, Belgium, 14-18 December, 1992, Volume 4, A. Danthine, Otto Spaniol, North-Holland, 1993, pp. 340, 341, 344

[search inside the book for “bucket list"]

I thought it gained legs as a term from the movie of the same name.

I’d like to hear that it came into use in that sense as a result of some computer guys sitting around, joking.

I don’t think the example in the computing book is a fixed expression, but just “a list of buckets”, where bucket has a number of technical meanings in computing.