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Kel Richards’ Ozword of the Day: “Bugs”
With the world stunned by a global computer outage, we find ourselves bombarded by the word ‘bug’—this was not, we are told, a hacking attack, it was a small ‘bug’ in a program patch. But why is such a thing called a ‘bug’?
Well, there is a story behind this use of the word, and, as it happens the story is wrong. But it’s so widespread, let me explain it and then debunk it.
The story is that the word was first used by computer language pioneer Dr Grace Hooper. On September 9, 1947, she was part of team working on Harvard University’s Mark II computer that found a bug gumming up the works—a moth had squeezed into one of the machine’s components—creating a short-circuit.
After extracting it, Dr Hooper taped it to the logbook with the caption ‘first actual case of a bug being found.’ That logbook, with moth intact, is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
It’s a great story, and I’m sure it really happened.
But it’s not the origin of the use of ‘bug’ for a defect or fault in a machine or in a process (especially an electrical or electronic one).
That use of the word ‘bug’ has been traced back to at least 1875. Then there is a letter written by Thomas Edison in 1878 in which he refers to ‘bugs’, explaining this is what ‘such little faults and difficulties are called.’
In 1889 the Pall Mall Gazette reported that Thomas Edison had been up for two nights fixing a ‘bug’ in his phonograph. An electrical handbook of 1896 suggests it had long been used by telegraphers to suggest that electromechanical glitches were caused by bugs getting into the cables.
Clearly Grace Hooper knew this, which is why she wrote: ‘first actual case of a bug being found’—clearly a play on the already existing language of small faults being called ‘bugs.’
The ‘bugs’ have been around for as long as we have been using electricity—not just from Harvard in 1947.
Tonight I will be a panelist on ‘The Sunday Showdown’ on Sky News.
Author is Kel Richards & you might wish to follow him as I do …
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Blogger Peter H Bloecker, Gold Coast QLD OZ.
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