From: bob@pupress.princeton.edu (Robert Brown) Newsgroups: alt.quotations Subject: Re: Computers Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 13:52:50 GMTIn article <DtKKtD.Hyo@world.std.com> libmgmt@world.std.com (Elizabeth B. Thomsen) writes: >[lines deleted, fore and aft]
>: Also with regard to the ``apocryphal'' story of the term ``bug'', I suggest
>: that reading a biography of Grace Hopper (the early computer guru, inventor
>: of COBOL, navy admiral, etc.) and you can confirm that it is not an
>: apocryphal story at all.
>
>What's apocryphal is not the story itself-- nobody doubts that Grace
>Hopper (one of my personal heroines) recorded the finding of the moth, or
>referred to it as [paraphrase] "the first actual bug" or whatever. What
>is being questioned is that this is the origin of the term bug. My
>personal opinion is that Grace Hopper was familiar with the earlier uses
>of the term "bug" for a problem in a system, used the term facetiously in
>reference to the moth, and that this helped popularize the term in the
>computer world.
To further Ms. Thomsen's argument, I cite Edward Tenner, *Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences* (Random House, 1996). Dr. Tenner, a historian of science who is currently at the Smithsonian Institution and has an appointment in the Geology Department at Princeton, quotes Thomas Edison using the term "bugs" as early as 1878, for flaws in a system. Tenner points out that the word was a common "shop" term even in Edison's time for such systems faults. The carryover to computers-- systems all--is logical. Why "bug" was used for "fault" may be induced from the fact that the term appeared as early as the 14th cent. to mean "an object of dread" (*Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology*), from the Welsh word *bwg* for "hobgoblin." *Webster's 10th Collegiate* cites it as meaning "an unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection"--no mention of computer origins, not in 1622 at any rate.
That Grace Hopper would have isolated a moth "bug" which gummed up the computer works seems to indicate her appreciating the pun on the two commonly known uses for the term.
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