
“First actual case of bug being found” (1947) - saycheese
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H96566k.jpg
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jl6
What I find almost as interesting is the handwritten "computer log".

I think developers could benefit from keeping a kind of lab book documenting
progress, as much software construction is experimental.

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Piskvorrr
And it could be named, for example, CHANGES.md ;)

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saycheese
Really wish if a user changes the headline that it's noted who changed it,
why, and that past headlines are viewable.

Issues like this really make me want to stop using HN.

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infradig
I always thought the origin was from "bugbear", an irritating or annoying
thing that had be endured if not eliminated.

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WalterBright
"Now, you fellows," he declared determinedly, "I've locked the door, and
you'll have to stay here until this Job is completed. Well, let's find the
'bugs'."

\-- "Edison", Josephson, pg. 90, about Edison in the early 1870's

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Nomentatus
Babbage.

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EGreg
So this shows that Grace Hopper did _not_ invent the term "computer bug" and
it was _not_ based on an actual bug being found?

I am all for women's empowerment but I now won't be able to honestly use that
pithy soundbite that Grace Hopper came up with that term.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2515435/app-
development...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2515435/app-
development/moth-in-the-machine--debugging-the-origins-of--bug-.html)

~~~
drewcrawford
The term is based on a figurative bug being found. OED traces this usage to

> Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering
> ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and
> implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is
> causing all the trouble. - The Pall Mall gazette, 1899

which seems to be reporting a bit of jargon in use at Menlo Park at that time
that would be completely unfamiliar to the reader.

At some point the jargon spread more widely in engineering culture, this usage
from The Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society 1935 assumes some
familiarity with the term, and attributes it to a whole country instead of a
lab:

> Casting, forging and riveting are processes hundreds of years old, and, to
> use an Americanism, ‘have the bugs ironed out of them’.

In this context, the "First case of an actual bug being found" would be the
first time that a problem was traced to a _literal_ bug, instead of a
figurative one. This would have been engineering humor, as if Google Cloud
Platform went down due to a thunderstorm.

As the term "bug" became more closely tied to computer culture, we started
thinking of its origins in strictly computer terms (and so you pose the
question about the invention of the " _computer_ bug"). The moth story is
certainly an early usage in computing, and was a major inflection point for
the computing usage, so as origin stories go it is a reasonable answer to the
question.

It's just that the label of the _computer_ bug does not reflect the real
development of the term. Bugs were part of the engineering jargon long before
computers, so the extension of this vocabulary to yet another engineering
field would not have been notable at the time.

