The Bug in the Computer Bug Story (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The Bug in the Computer Bug Story (2022)

daily.jstor.org

36 pointsrefibrillator10 comments

Debunking of the bug story as etymological folklore has been going on since at least 1984. Every few years there's another article about it (which is good for the daily 10,000.) The first appears to have been in Byte magazine and then IEEE Annals of the History of Computing in 1984. Followed by American Speech in 1987 and again in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing in 1998.

Links: https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1984-07_OCR/page/n33/mod... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4640793 https://doi.org/10.2307/455415 http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/arya/Papers/IEEE/HTML%20Docs/Computer%...

Bug was clearly part of the lexicon already. Otherwise no one would have written "First actual case of bug being found." And it wouldn't have been so funny.

Pedant "debunking" obvious joke in a JSTOR article is pretty funny in its own right, though. I hope Matthew Wills will explain how chickens don't cross roads next!

It's apparently not obvious because I always see people misunderstanding it (followed by corrections in the replies, generally).[0]

[0] Random example: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4g0j3r/til_the_firs...

And the article that reddit post links to is titled "First computer bug found 66 years ago" which quotes it but fails the notice the distinction between "first actual computer bug" and "first actual case of bug being found" and turning that into the reddit title "The first computer bug ever discovered was a real insect: a moth trapped between the relays".

"This was litterally the first thing we were taught in programming class at uni. You'd be surprised at how many things actually makes sense if you know the story behind them!"

Sigh.

The article addresses this:

> Computer people adopted a term in use for more than half a century and brought it into the digital world. The wording in the Harvard log book—“first actual case of a bug being found”—suggests the computer programmers and engineers there were already quite familiar with the time-honored usage and were remarking on the novelty of finding an actual insect bugging up the computer. “Debug,” by the way, was also used in an 1945 issue of the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, which Shapiro takes to suggest it was “probably preceded by several years of oral use in engineering slang.”

I've never heard the joke version of this story. It's only people earnestly explaining that this is where the word bug comes from. Or people debunking that.

"First actual bug" gets turned into "first bug was an actual bug" in the retelling, and people are pretty insistent about it.

Schrödinger's cat is something that I have always assumed to obviously be a joke and nobody was expected to argue it literally.

I like how it's expressed in Dirk Gently - "Schrödinger's Cat isn't a real experiment. It's just an illustration for arguing about the idea [...] Schrödinger put forward this idea to illustrate what he thought was absurd about quantum theory." -- Douglas Adams

Grace Hopper joked about finding a literal bug, because "bug" was already a term for a defect at the time. It it weren't, the joke wouldn't make sense. There seems to be widespread confusion about that, leading to people to write "debunking" stories every couple of years.

I mean, the sentence "The first actual case of a bug being found" implies that "bug" was already being used in the context of a malfunctioning computer. Otherwise, why would they write it?

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