But “bug” really got popular because of Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, one of the Greats of the Computer Industry… In 1945, she was working at Harvard on the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer. In the afternoon of the 9th of September, the operators started an Adding Test at 3.25 - but this primitive computer kept adding wrongly. So the operators went looking, and found a moth trapped between the metal contact points of Relay 70, in Panel F. At 3.45, they had removed it from Relay 70, Panel F and sticky-taped it into the logbook, with the comment underneath of “First actual case of bug being found”. The story soon spread of how the operators had “debugged” the computer. Grace Hopper was not the person who actually found the moth, but, because of her senior position with the Mark II computer, and because of the respect that everybody had for her, she became associated with the term “computer bug”.
Its true. I have read it in books about the MARK II and early computers and have seen it on PBS, and also was a million dollar question on Who Wants To Be a Millionare.
Ben
The story about finding the bug is true. But “bug” to mean “a problem” had been around in engineering circles for years. I.e., it was not the actual first usage of the word as such, even in a computer context. This has been discussed in previous threads at the SDMB.
It was intended to purely be a joke among the staff, who already knew well about the common meaning of the word.
The true part is that Dr. Hopper discovered a moth (?) that had gotten into the massive wiring of the computer and caused a short and that she then removed it and jokingly kept it around as a “computer bug.”
The “sort of” aspect is that she was not inventing a new term, but making a joke based on an old term.
The OED provides the following citation to the earliest recorded use of “bug” with that meaning (note the date):
Anyone who has read contemporary accounts of troubleshooting among any technological endeavor throughout the 20th century prior to Dr. Hopper’s “discovery” is well aware that the use of “bug” to mean an unsolved problem was thoroughly entrenched in the language.
Dr. Hopper’s moth was simply the a physical manifestation of an old concept, prompting its humorous trip into history.
The word `bug’ meaning something bad goes back to the Shakespearian era, when Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defines it as a “frightful object; a walking spectre.” As has been said above, it was in wide use in Edison’s era as a humorous description of what was causing things like line noise or machine faults. Grace Hopper’s moth was simply the first actual bug to cause a bug.
The Hopper incident with a moth getting caught in the computer popularized the term “bug” in the sense that, without the incident, there would probably have been another term that would have come to mean what we now mean by “bug.” At the time of the Hopper moth incident, “bug” for the engineers working on early computers meant any mysterioous problem, but the engineers weren’t thinking in terms of errors in software. Remember that in early computers, hardward problems were much more common than software problems were. At first, it was very difficult to finish a big calculation without part of the computer hardware breaking down. The Hopper moth incident happened at that point, and the engineers naturally made the analogy that this was a “bug.” For the engineers at that time, the term “bug” meant a hardware error. They barely had any general idea of a software error.
After the Hopper moth incident, the term “bug” for a while meant any problem, either in the hardware or the software. Then hardware errors became less and less common. Nowdays most computer programmers don’t even think about hardware bugs. For them, a bug is a software error. They wouldn’t use the term “bug” to apply to hardware errors. I suspect that without the Hopper moth incident, the term “bug” would never have shifted from being an engineer’s description of a physical problem in the hardware to being a programer’s name for a software problem. I contend that without the Hopper moth incident some other term would have been invented for what we now call a “bug.”
The version I heard for the origin was the early days of the telehone, maintenance people would refer to a line that was noisy as “having Bugs on the line” and from that it moved to being a general description for an electronic problem
> How about a bug as a reference to " a fly in the ointment"
> (given as something wrong in a scheme).
What about it? There’s no evidence that that was the origin of the term. It’s possible, I suppose, that the term continues to be used because programmers have a mental image of a computer software error as being like a bug annoying them (like a mosquito that they can’t seem to get rid of, or like flies littering the floor of a seldom used room), but that’s not the origin of the term.