The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies | Hacker News Reader

The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

lunduke.substack.com

189 pointsfunOtter117 comments

The log book entry that says, "First actual case of bug being found", indeed always seemed like a piece of humour to me. The presence of the word "actual" in the entry makes sense only if the term "bug" to mean defects is already established in the industry. If this log book entry really were the first time a bug was found in a computer, it would have merely said, "a bug was found", not "first actual case of bug".

Imagine a world where there is no Python programming language. One day you arrive at your office and find a python (the reptile) on your desk. You would probably say, "found a python at my desk". But if that were to happen today, I am sure pictures of it would be taken and circulated within the team with captions like, "An actual Python workspace".

The presence of the word "actual" is the clue that the term is well established in the engineering world and that it is an attempt at humour.

Yep, nobody got presented awards for the "First World War".

People did actually start calling WW1 "The first world war" long before WW2 started. There is even few instances of that terminology going back to 1914.

They were pessimistic there would be more.

Couldn't it also have been called "First World War" because it was the first war where fighting happened

- over multiple continents - with huge number of countries participating - at the same time - as part of the same conflict

Arguably, that honor goes to the Seven Years' War, which saw significant fighting both in Europe and in North America.

The French Revolutionary Wars/Napoleonic Wars were equally grand in scale, and conducted at a time when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers--all of the major ones got involved in those conflicts at one point or another; even the newly-independent US got peripherally involved (the War of 1812 is partially started due to the effects the Napoleonic Wars had on US shipping).

> when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers

The United States, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia all entered the war.

There were significant theaters of the war in Africa and the Middle East.

China was initially neutral in WWI but did eventually declare support for the Entente and sent 140,000 laborers to Europe. [1]

Brazil entered the war after losing ships to German U boats. [2]

Over a million Indian troops participated. [3]

Thailand, New Guinea, and Samoa were involved [4]

And I’m just scratching the surface. The very worst fighting was concentrated in the industrial meat grinders of the front lines in Europe but there was significant participation from all corners of the earth. It earned the name “World War.”

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_during_World_War_I

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_during_World_War_I

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War...

4. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_and_Pacific_theatre_of...

> when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers

Why though? I think even China alone had almost as large a population in 1800 (300M) as the US does right now so I'm confused what this is supposed to mean? Japan also had some 30M, Russia 35M. (I haven't checked other countries.)

We're defining "the world" in 1800 to be "European powers" so that we can claim the first world war was actually before World War I?

Sorry, I should have clarified further. This is "world" in terms of European political discourse--as far as Europe was concerned, if you weren't a European power (and Russia most certainly was a European power), you weren't really a country worth caring about, just fodder for imperialism and colonization.

Okay sure I guess, but what is this meant to imply? Even taking it at face value, this clearly still didn't cause Europe to call that war the first World War, so what conclusion are we drawing from this?

Ferdinand Foch (French WW1 general) called the Versailles treaty a 20 year armistice in 1919. He thought the treaty was too lenient.

I remember seeing more The Great War or The War to End Wars in post-WWI docs and media. Wikipedia says yes, it was WWI soon after the war, but that wasn't common yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Names

Interesting. I had to look that up, and apparently a Lt Col called it that in his 1920 memoirs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Names

In my experience, it was always "The Great War".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_%C3%A0_Court_Repington

Pessimistic, but not wrong.

"World War I" would have been a better example.

That only made sense after WWII.

or for the First Battle of Bull Run during the Civil War.

Yes! IIRC there was an Encyclopedia Brown[1] case where he unmasks a fraudulent Civil War relic that had the inscription "for the First Battle of Bull Run", on the grounds that no one at the time would have called it the "First".

[1] Kid-detective series where the titular character, Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, solves crimes by finding inconsistencies that require domain knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Brown

Yeah, it was the “Case of the Civil War Sword”.

https://brownencyclopedia.tumblr.com/post/13020192322/the-ca...

I'd just like to say that Thomas Edison's handwriting in his letter is absolutely beautiful. It almost looks like it's been typed out on a computer using a funky font. It's funny how the handwriting of almost everyone I know is quite bad these days. My own is almost illegible! I wonder what everyone thinks about this general degradation in penmanship? I guess it's not really needed in this day and age, but there's something beautiful about nice handwriting on paper.

I remembered someone once posted about Dijkstra's handwriting being incredible, so I tracked down the link for you, see the third image on that page for an example: https://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-hand...

The whole blog is about trying to write like Dijkstra.

The more amazing aspect of that blog post is the authors lack of familiarity with cursive script. Ordinarily, few people would be impressed by neat but otherwise mundane block letter handwriting.

Ah yes, Dijkstra, the man responsible for adding i, j, and k to the alphabet.

Edison's handwriting is unusually legible even by the standards of that period. You can look at many other historical artefacts to see what the average looked like.

I looked up letters written by other 20th century scientists, the average looks pretty good: Marie Curie: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7722951 Tesla: https://www.benjamindecasseres.com/nikola-teslas-letter-to-b...

They all seem to have this really "flowy" style

>...They all seem to have this really "flowy" style.

I guess, the flow was needed to literally maintain the flow of ink off the pen.

This is what cursive was designed for - removing and replacing the pen could result in a splotch so it was reduced as much as possible.

The average looks pretty similar to what's taught in schools today (in places that still teach handwriting).

I agree. I would say handwriting has actually improved in legibility through history if anything. Most historic handwriting tended to be closer to what today we would call shorthand or stenography. Even in formal texts, it is common to find missing vowels or worse (and if you go even farther back in time, it is common to find the same word spelled in different ways even within the same page).

In those days people took pride in their handwriting, nowadays the best you can do is to brag about your LaTeX typesetting

> people took pride in their handwriting

A handwritten letter was often how others got their first impression of you, so you had external motivation for caring about it.

Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...

Good riddance. I remember being forced to do this as a kid and knowing full well it was a waste of time and that my life would be spent with keyboards. The only time ive ever "needed" it was exactly once to write that paragraph they make you reproduce in cursive for the SAT, which makes no sense in the first place, as though the weight carried by an attestation is modulated by the font it's rendered in.

Now i feel bad for my colleagues who were diligent students and learned cursive. They are stuck with handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population with every passing year. The only benefit it offers is being marginally faster than printing, but still vastly slower than typing. People are so used to reading print that i would argue cursive is becoming regarded as somewhat unprofessional.

> handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population

Are younger people really not able to read cursive? I find that hard to believe; it's still the same letters.

Plenty of the letters are different enough, especially in the middle of a word. IMO, messy cursive is WAY harder to read than messy print writing.

For what’s it’s worth my Japanese friends can’t read cursive.

Weirdly enough, I went through school before then and learned cursive and I only use it on receipts and the occasional bank check. It has little to do with cursive being taught and more to do with cursive, and handwriting in general, being irrelevant.

You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left

Faster and with better retentIon when taking notes in meetings (or classes).

Same here! And I used a typewriter for my essays at university. These days if I scribble things down its just a scrawl (not really printing or cursive to be honest).

Good. We no longer use ink pens which make it important to avoid lifting pen from paper, so block lettering is more legible and should be what is taught.

Sure, we type often and so write much less than we used to, but most of us still write on occasion, so writing must still be taught.

I think this is basically mixing up cause and effect. Cursive has been dropped from the curriculum because no one writes in cursive anymore.

I tried to improve my handwriting some years ago but didn't really commit to it, the upshot of that is that my handwriting kind of looks like a Victorian child's. It's 'loopy' in that old-fashioned way but the shapes aren't regular and controlled enough to be considered good handwriting.

If you're right-handed, I highly recommend learning to write in italic. That's with a slight tilt to every letter, from bottom left to top right. Unless you hold a pen in an unusual way, this should be an easy movement.

You might want to start by just writing a line of conjoined wwwwwwwwww or mmmmmmmm. Then tweak the movement when you introduce individual letters, wewnwy, etc.

I did it years ago to increase my writing speed, and reduce discomfort if I was writing for a prolonged time (handwritten exams). Hugely beneficial.

Increased legibility was an added bonus, although this probably requires deliberate attention for some people.

Edit: From brief Googling, I gather the terms italic and cursive are often used interchangeably. My distinction between the two is that cursive is italic plus extra decorations (loops etc).

I love the look of italic handwriting from the examples I've just looked at! I'll definitely look into it.

Cursive is essentially what happens if you try to write without lifting your pen from the paper.

You can always get a job as a doctor writing prescriptions, lol.

More seriously, I've always had bad handwriting; I even had extra lessons to try and improve dexterity and whatnot. I did look at old school stuff at some point and it was relatively neat compared to my current handwriting - I've definitely regressed.

I don't even know why. I don't believe my small motor skills are that bad. Laziness? Not paying enough attention while writing?

Anyway typing is more my jam.

When I see that I ask myself:

- Was good handwriting necessary for success in that time?

- If so, how many people as creative as Edison languished because their handwriting sucked.

That's a good point. It's like how writing a good email is pretty essential these days, and people might lose out these days because of poor "online" communication

Listening to the average engineer presenting makes it really hard not to fall asleep. Reading the average engineers email it's often hard to find the point they're trying to make.

I think communication should be taught more in undergraduate engineering curricula.

I was looking through old (1900 - 1940) census records recently, they were all hand written then. Some people had beautifully legible writing, others chicken scratch, and occasionally I'd see something like what the average 30-something's handwriting looks like today.

When I was young there was talk about getting rid of cursive handwriting in school. We were still required to turn in writing assignments hand written in cursive in ink. The older generation would say it was a skill worth practicing, while kids would joke about all the lies lower grade teachers told us about higher grades ("in middle school if you don't write in cursive they won't accept your assignment"). Today they don't teach cursive.

I wish I had better handwriting and now I practice to improve it.

Those who learned to write with dip pens blame the ballpoint pens. However, people who actually use dip pens say that mass-made ones were not that good at helping you write better.

There is also another interesting question of how complex writing exercises set the manner to express one's thoughts both orally and on paper.

You have missed fountain pens. I found I wrote better when I used one, but it was compulsory at school until I was about 14. At that point, I immediately switched to a ball point pen, mostly to rebel and feel older.

I switched back once I was more mature.

Dip pens were obsoleted in the late 19th century.

I am a bit skeptical about millions and millions of kids all across the world having fountain pens.

It's up to each school, but it's common in the UK.

Note all the "back to school" offers, and the cheap £4 pen.

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/stationery/pens/fountain-pens/sta0...

(The same might apply in India, in which case there are literally millions of children with fountain pens.)

I learned handwriting in schools (early 90s) and like many it turned into absolute chicken scratch by high school as with many.

Somewhere between high school and college I decided it was worth fixing and after a few years it got much better, continuing to improve for the next ten years or so.

I'm really glad I did it - my notes flow more easily, my written correspondence impresses and I have the common sense to simply hand print when one shot understanding is more important than aesthetics.

How did you go about improving it?

There are a number of techniques you can use, but it really boils down to practice repetition. Some exercises that seemed to help me, when done at night before going to bed (about 5 minutes or so) is to take a piece of paper and write a bunch of parallel lines (basically small letter "L") and try to get them to be exactly the same. Then draw a bunch of circles (letter "O") and try to make them the same size and perfectly round. Do it slow enough at first so you don't practice in bad technique, then try to get faster at it.

Also, as part of a woodworking hobby I'm getting back into, I needed to start drawing out sketches of projects. I started with some light graph paper to get proportions right, but now can somewhat easily draw out the board layouts of things like desks or dressers and get fairly straight lines over distance on the paper. I couldn't do this before.

Oh, and getting something like a good fountain pen that flows good, with good paper, will make you "want" to write whenever you get the chance. Get a nice one or two, but also pick up a pack of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens -- they actually write fairly decent, and aren't fussy at all.

I wonder if anyone has made a font based on his handwriting.

Not only that, there is not one correction in that letter. Do they have multiple drafts before writing the final version that is sent?

What I remember from my youth (60s): you basically weren't allowed to strike-through, you had to start over the sentence. Many kids thus would learn to write without making errors, making sure you would think ahead about how to formulate properly while writing.

This also has assisted me in thinking before I speak.

The presence of the backspace key has spoilt me. I hardly write anything with a pen and paper these days.

I guess people dont write much so dont have the fine motor skills. But also cheap ballpoint pens are difficult to write with. Get a more expensive pen or even fountain pen makes it easier to write tidily.

My handwriting used to be exquisite. Adults would be taken aback by the quality when I was ten-twelve years old.

It's trash now.

The logbook entry only makes sense if "bug" is a pre-existing term for a glitch, otherwise the humor with the real bug would fall flat. So I never understood how anybody could claim that it was the origin of the term.

Right. This is an utterly bizarre thing to rebut: it's clear in context that the "bug" is a humorous reference to a common term (one that predates computers entirely).

The only false part of the entire story is the claim that Hopper invented the term which, to my knowledge, she never claimed. It's just computer apocrypha; the kind every field has.

The use of "bug" to refer to an operational problem goes back to at least the mid 19th century. I vaguely remember an article where the author found reference to getting the bugs out of the design of a carriage.

https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?id=24...

Yes I thought the author missed this point in his zeal to prove that a Grace Hopper story was a fraud. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can have all kinds of apocryphal stories associated with them, but that's more common among men.

No, xe addressed that point quite explicitly: "Whoever wrote that famous 1947 log entry [...] was making a joke."

The sad fact is that one can find people repeating this tale and incorrectly attributing the origin of the term to Hopper. I'd have to pull my old back issues of BYTE out of storage to check that the January 1984 one did misattribute this as claimed, but it was definitely still a subject for discussion in the BYTE letters pages in 1985.

Ada Lovelace wrote what is often considered the first computer program, a set of instructions for the (unbuilt) Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli Numbers.

Appropriately, if this is the first computer program, it also contains the first bug! It's impossible to say whether this was a typesetting error or Lovelace's original, but the transcription of her instructions accidentally transpose a "v4" and "v5".

source: https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm...

People like to get pedantic about whether or not Ada's program was "the first program" or not, but it's fair to say that it was at least the first nontrivial program, and that she was the first to recognize both what calculating machines would eventually be capable of (e.g. manipulating text by assigning letters and symbols to numbers) and the inherent difficulty of transforming state in such complex ways (writing complex programs would not be a simple task).

> It’s the intricacies of her program, though, that make it so remarkable. Whether or not she ought to be known as “the first programmer,” her program was specified with a degree of rigor that far surpassed anything that came before. She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop. She realized how important it was to track the state of variables as they changed, introducing a notation to illustrate those changes. As a programmer myself, I’m startled to see how much of what Lovelace was doing resembles the experience of writing software today.

> ...

> One Wikipedia article calls Lovelace the first to publish a “complex program.” Maybe that’s the right way to think about Lovelace’ accomplishment. Menabrea published “diagrams of development” in his paper a year before Lovelace published her translation. Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though there’s always room to quibble about what exactly constitutes a “program.” Even so, Lovelace’s program was miles ahead of anything else that had been published before. The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). Menabrea wrote the following toward the end of his paper:

>> When once the engine shall have been constructed, the difficulty will be reduced to the making of the cards; but as these are merely the translation of algebraic formulae, it will, by means of some simple notation, be easy to consign the execution of them to a workman.20

> Neither Babbage nor Menabrea were especially interested in applying the Analytical Engine to problems beyond the immediate mathematical challenges that first drove Babbage to construct calculating machines. Lovelace saw that the Analytical Engine was capable of much more than Babbage or Menabrea could imagine. Lovelace also grasped that “the making of the cards” would not be a mere afterthought and that it could be done well or done poorly. This is hard to appreciate without understanding her program from Note G and seeing for oneself the care she put into designing it. But having done that, you might agree that Lovelace, even if she was not the very first programmer, was the first programmer to deserve the title.

Mundane observation, but I love reading stories about this era of computing and seeing the history that’s behind all the conventions we take for granted. The “log” was an actual notebook that was manually updated by a human, taking its name from a nautical logbook. The “console” was called that because it was a piece of furniture (a console table) that happened to contain lights that showed the system status. This stuff is fascinating.

> The “console” was called that because it was a piece of furniture

I've heard that one's 'study' used to be a piece of furniture which held private papers etc in otherwise non-private or collective housing. Apparently the preferred color and grain of wood for such furniture now informs the conventional look of a "study" as an entire room. Source was moderately credible, IIRC.

I decided to research it. It doesn't appear that the furniture was first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_(room)#History says:

> The study developed from the closet or cabinet of the Renaissance era. From the beginning of the 18th century onwards increased literacy at the middle-class family level led to the setting aside of closed study and library areas within larger houses."

I found a 1635 example of such a closest in "A commentary vpon the Epistles of Saint Paul to Philemon, and to the Hebrewes together with a compendious explication of the second and third Epistles of Saint Iohn." at https://llds.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/llds/xmlui/bitstream/handle/... :

> There must be a closet, or a place to study in, that is, the chamber of our owne hearts."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/study says:

> Sense of "room furnished with books" is from late 14c.

It's unlikely that there was a specific "study" desk at that point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk#History says:

> Desk-style furniture appears not to have been used in classical antiquity or in other ancient centers of literate civilization in the Middle East or Far East, but there is no specific proof. Medieval illustrations show the first pieces of furniture which seem to have been designed and constructed for reading and writing. Before the invention of the movable type printing press in the 15th century, any reader was potentially a writer or publisher or both, since any book or other document had to be copied by hand. The desks were designed with slots and hooks for bookmarks and for writing implements. Since manuscript volumes were sometimes large and heavy, desks of the period usually had massive structures.

Here are some early desks:

1480 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_(Ghi...

1478 - https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/malesskir...

1500 - http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/14/77089

I don't see how they particularly inform the modern study.

Well, of course. They were very familiar with the term "bug" meaning defect or flaw in an engineered system, so the joke was that here was a flesh-and-blood "bug." It's obvious from the phrasing that the term "bug" was commonly used.

Grace Hopper telling the bug story, saying that [THIS PART MIGHT BE WRONG, SEE BELOW: she was there but] the bug was extracted from the relay and the note written in the logbook by “the operator”:

> “We were building Mark II on the summer of 1945 [...] Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay, it was one of the big signal relays, and inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth about this big.”

> “So the operator got a pair of tweezers and very carefully fished the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook, put scotch tape over it, and below it he wrote «first actual bug found».”

> “I’m sure you'll be glad to know that the bug is still under the log under the scotch tape in the log book. It’s in the museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center [now Naval Surface Warfare Center https://www.navy.mil/NAVAL-SURFACE-WARFARE-CENTER-DAHLGREN/] at Dahlgren Virginia.”

> “Now I’ve told that story a lot of times but it turned out some people didn’t believe me. Among them the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, so they made an expedition to Dahlgren and sure enough they found the bug under the scotch tape in the log book so they took a picture of it, and they published it in the July 1981 Annals of the History of Computing. So the first bug is now legal, and I think it’s rather nice that the Navy is preserving some of the early artifacts like the first bug, and me, and a few other things.”

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABlivzyfhQE&t=518s

Now, what the author of the linked article (Lunduke) is disputing is the distorted re-telling of this story by others. Grace Hopper did not claim that the writing was hers or that it was the origin of the term “bug” applied to computers, that was sloppy journalists.

There is one small detail in Lunduke’s article that I could criticize:

> “Nor was it found or recorded by Grace Hopper.”

She did not record it as noted above, but she clearly says that she was part of the group that “debugged” Mark II that day.

Edit to add: see also eesmith’s comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32518611

Edit 2: the comment by psychoslave links to the Wikipedia page without further context, and there it says that Hopper was not present when the moth was found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#cite_ref-huggins_...

Following the citations in that section of the Wikipedia page, I got this:

> “During the 1986 interviews, Gene Gleirsner and Ralph Niemann recalled that the Mark II operator who found the bug and taped it into the logbook was Bill Burke, who later moved to Dahlgren as a computer operator.”

> “Howard Aiken's Third Machine: The Harvard Mark III Calculator or Aiken-Dahlgren Electronic Calculator”, in “IEEE Annals of the History of Computing” January-March 2000, vol. 22, page 81: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2000/01/man2000010...

I haven’t been able to find any clear mention by Grace Hopper on whether she was there when the moth was found: in the video I linked at the top she might have said “They finally located” instead of “We finally located” as I heard. If she wasn’t there, then Lunduke’s article would be, AFAICT, completely correct. It is in any case way more correct than others I’ve read.

Bryan Lunduke is known (at least to me) for trending towards the exaggerated, clickbait style. This being just one of many examples of that approach.

Upvoting for moderate, matter-of-fact language, although there is also exaggeration for fun when someone's values (including self-confessed geeky values and enthusiasm) are clear. YMMV.

i don't remember hopper being part of the story (although i've never been one for names).

the story claimed it was the first ever computer bug. the fact that edison used to have to pick them out of telephone and telegraph equipment doesn't refute this for me, unless you want to make some claim that manually switched telephone/telegraph networks were actually computing something.

> the story claimed it was the first ever computer bug.

About this part, the comment by eesmith (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32518611) cites a page at Harvard University saying this:

> “Before 1944, electrical engineers already used the term «bug» to refer to hard-to-find physical defects that hindered the operation of an electric device. The Mark I team appropriated the term for unexpected problems in the «coding» of a problem. Above are cartoons drawn by Grace Hopper of the different types of bugs encountered during her work.”

> https://chsi.harvard.edu/harvard-ibm-mark-1-language

> i don't remember hopper being part of the story (although i've never been one for names).

You are right, I might have been mistaken in understanding her sentence “We finally located...”. I’ve added a note about it that at the end of my comment:

> Edit 2: the comment by psychoslave links to the Wikipedia page without further context, and there it says that Hopper was not present when the moth was found: [...]

> I haven’t been able to find any clear mention by Grace Hopper on whether she was there when the moth was found: in the video I linked at the top she might have said “They finally located” instead of “We finally located” as I heard. If she wasn’t there, then Lunduke’s article would be, AFAICT, completely correct. It is in any case way more correct than others I’ve read.

The most fascinating thing about this story is we're witnessing the making of a myth - and how good people are at myth making. People love telling these stories even when they know they may not be 100% true. It's the story that matters, not the veracity. That's the challenge of a historian, separating fact from myth.

The human mind works on narratives, from myths and legends to research papers and court cases.

So, does anybody know why in telegraph jargon they started referring to "false signals" as "bugs"?

probably due to clicking or chirping noise caused by old/rusty/faulty wires

I was wondering the same. The picture accompanying that text was a plate from a Vibroplex Bug, a semiautomatic telegraph key.

https://infostory.com/2013/08/27/debugging-the-origin-of-the... talks a bit more about the bug trap and the false signals.

If it were true, why would they write "first actual case of a bug being found"? It would be similar to people calling the First World War the First World War at the time. It doesn't make any sense. But it's a story that people want to be true, so nobody questions it.

It bugs me a bit when people call myths lies.

I had impression that "bugs" notion migrated to programs from bugs found in books.

In older days, getting a used book from an unknown house/shop carried serious risks of receiving an infestation of some bugs (bedbugs, cockroaches, etc).

So one had to be wary of this and not put such stray books right into the bookshelf with the rest of the good books. Thus some valuable books did have bugs.

I could imagine a possible bug infestation in a stack of punch cards. Though the program printout can have "bugs" by association with a book.

I actually saw Grace Hopper in LA during the early 80s. She told this story, along with showing her physical "nanosecond" (the string representing the distance light travels in a nanosecond).

I doubt she said "no one ever called it a bug before this." I also don't remember if she claimed to have written the notation in the log, or merely said that someone did. It was a just a charming pun about bugs, and a story about how big that computer was.

Video for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jFcaj3ovk

Thanks. I thought I remembered she had a microsecond, too, but I wasn't sure so I left that out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History

Talking of BYTE: W Jay Dowling wrote a "Dead Jerry" letter that was published in the March 1985 edition of BYTE (W. Jay Dowling. "The Earliest Bug", BYTE. March 1985. 10(3) 350.) giving a longer history of the term. Jerry Pournelle's response was to note that a lot of people had written in to BYTE about its tale of the origin of the term.

I vaguely recall the first time I read this story that Grace Hopper was not the person who found the moth.

She says a male operator recorded it.

Here's an audio recording of Hopper relating that story: https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12.

You'll see she says "they found the failing relay" and "the operator got a pair of tweezers ... and below it he wrote “First actual case of bug being found.”"

https://chsi.harvard.edu/harvard-ibm-mark-1-language notes four terms which entered programming through the Mark I, not the Mark II. These are: "Loop", "Patch", "Library", and "Bug" - with images of the physical nature of the first three! For the latter it says (emphasis mine):

] The "Bug"

] Before 1944, electrical engineers already used the term "bug" to refer to hard-to-find physical defects that hindered the operation of an electric device. The Mark I team appropriated the term for unexpected problems in the "coding" of a problem. Above are cartoons drawn by Grace Hopper of the different types of bugs encountered during her work.

The paper "Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug" by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell (doi:10.1109/85.728224) date those cartoons to 1945, and gives other pre-Mark II examples of using 'bug' for the Mark I:

] I. B. Cohen has examined a photocopy of the logbook kept by Robert Campbell, a young physicist at the Computation Laboratory. It tersely summarizes hours spent finding and correcting errors. On 17 April 1944, Campbell wrote, "Ran test program. Mr. Durfee from I.B.M. was here to help us find 'bugs.'"

and Hopper writing "a debugging note to operators" in 1945/1946 and "errors in mathematics and tape bugs pursued and captured by Ensign Bloch and Ensign Campbell."

The first recorded bug in a computer program appears to have been committed by Charles Babbage and found by Ada Lovelace. There is documentation of this. (They didn’t call it a “bug.”)

Still a smaller pile of lies than the Ada Lovelace story.

"Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace" - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t...

Just wait until the real story of Rosie the Riveter story gets more attention.

History is written by the victors, or at least master manipulators.

Good stories are more powerful than the truth.

How long before the Nikola Tesla fans turn up to tell us that his bugs were more catastrophic than Edison’s anyway?

"We'll have you know that Soviet microchips are the biggest microchips in the whole world!"

The story of the first "computer bug" is a pile of history

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story right?

Thanks *reads username* "fun otter"

But a cool article none the less, I love reading about computing history. I always thought the grace hopper story was a little too convenient

Fun story with legendary status that's clearly not meant to be taken seriously != a pile of lies.

Offensive, scummy, barrel scraping clickbait nonsense.

Clearly “pile of lies” was meant to be a humorous way to put it. Also I’ve heard that “first bug” story many times and never had the impression it wasn’t meant both seriously and literally.

It’s amazing that someone could find this innocuous title and page offensive.

> This was not the origin of term “bug” being used for engineering — including computer software.

No one claimed it was??

This whole article could've been saved if the author'd realized what a JOKE was.

> Considering the relatively small size of the team who worked on the Mark II, I’m hopeful to eventually get a definitive answer to this.

And then...never does provide an answer.

> No one claimed it was??

I have seen multiple claims that this is the origin of the word bug, at least in software. Including my first CS teacher explaining where the word bug came from. But, I always suspected there was at least some element of myth to the story. Granted, such renditions didn't have the exact quote from the logbook.

> And then...never does provide an answer.

Presumably, they haven't found the answer yet

It was even the winning question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: https://millionaire.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Trela

Why does Grace Hopper get a pass for outright lying for decades about this?

It’s apocrypha. I’m not sure that Grace Hopper ever actually claimed to invent the term “bug,” only that others have claimed that she did.

Right, she claims to have been there, but never claims to be the one who actually found it.

She never did. She's told the story many times - eg, https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12 - and never claimed she coined the term.

Because the reptilians that run the Deep State rely on you not knowing the Truth about this "bug". Those who are in possession of this Secret Truth cannot be fooled anymore. They see through all the lies, they know that Birds Are Not Real. /s

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