Most people know the phrase "There was a bug in my computer code." But, what is the origin of the word?
One of the more popular stories is that U.S. Navy Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Mark I computer at Harvard in 1945 when she fixed the computer by removing a dead moth from one of its circuits.
This "bug" was pasted into the daily log book and the term was born.
While this may have happened, the origin of the word "bug" in the context of a glitch in a system has much earlier origins.
Edward Tenner, in his 1996 book Why things bite back: technology and the revenge of unintended consequences, wrote that Thomas Edison intimated in a letter:
The first step is an intuition and it comes with a burst, then difficulties arise -- this thing gives out and then that -- 'Bugs' -- as such little faults and difficulties are called -- show themselves, and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success -- or failure -- is certainly reached.
(quoted on p. 14, and cited as being from Paul Hoffman's Six-legged saboteurs, Discover, May 1989, pp. 81-83.)
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