page_title: List of computer term etymologies
section_title: B
hierarchical_section_title: List of computer term etymologies / B
caption_attribution_description: English: The First "Computer Bug" Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". (The term "debugging" already existed; thus, finding an actual bug was an amusing occurrence.) In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia, which erroneously dated it 9 September 1945. The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History and other sources have the correct date of 9 September 1947 (Object ID: 1994.0191.01). The Harvard Mark II computer was not complete until the summer of 1947. Removed caption read: Photo # NH 96566-KB First Computer "Bug", 1945
context_page_description: This is a list of the origins of computer-related terms or terms used in the computing world. It relates to both computer hardware and computer software.
  Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles. However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest.
context_section_description: B — probably a contraction of "BCPL", reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7. Or, named after Bon.
  biff — named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on 15 August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to a certain Heidi Stettner. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed.
  bit — first used by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit". He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had used the word in a Bell Labs memo of 9 January 1947.
  Bon — created by Ken Thompson and named either after his wife Bonnie, or else after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas" (a reference to the Tibetan native religion Bön).
  booting or bootstrapping — from the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", originally used as a metaphor for any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. Used in computing due to the apparent paradox that a computer must run code to load anything into memory, but code cannot be run until it is loaded.
  bug — often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. However, use of the word 'bug' to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks and letters.
  byte — coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.
caption: The first case of an actual computer bug, a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II
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