From: James Petts <pettsj@visigoth.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: That darn "Bug" story
Organization: No Affiliation
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 06:58:54 GMT
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1



In article <+Qs-w5@engin.umich.edu> Ray Ingles, ingles@engin.umich.edu
writes:
> So: Is this true? Really? Where and when did it happen?
>Or is it just an urban myth?

The following is from the Jargon File, release 2.9.9

:bug: n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
   hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction.  Antonym of
   {feature}.  Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes
   things out backwards."  "The system crashed because of a hardware
   bug."  "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is
   a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).

   Historical note: Some have said this term came from telephone
   company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed
   for noisy lines, but this appears to be an incorrect folk
   etymology.  Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better
   known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a
   technician solved a persistent {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II
   machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts
   of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in
   its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was
   careful to admit, she was not there when it happened).  For many
   years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug
   in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface
   Warfare Center.  The entire story, with a picture of the logbook
   and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the `Annals of the
   History of Computing', Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.

   The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1945), reads "1545
   Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay.  First actual case of bug being
   found".  This wording seems to establish that the term was already
   in use at the time in its current specific sense --- and Hopper
   herself reports that the term `bug' was regularly applied to
   problems in radar electronics during WWII.  Indeed, the use of
   `bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in
   Thomas Edison's time, and `bug' in the sense of an disruptive
   event goes back to Shakespeare!  In the first edition of Samuel
   Johnson's dictionary one meaning of `bug' is "A frightful
   object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh
   term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the
   circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon
   through fantasy role-playing games.

   In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects.
   Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened:

   "There is a bug in this ant farm!"

   "What do you mean?  I don't see any ants in it."

   "That's the bug."

   [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved
   to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so
   asserted.  A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the
   bug was not there.  While investigating this in late 1990, your
   editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had
   unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it --- and
   that the present curator of the History of American Technology
   Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile
   exhibit.  It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991.  Thus, the
   process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in
   an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true!  --- ESR]

James Petts

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