10 ms·

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

189 points by funOtter 4y ago

satisfice 4y ago
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.”)
keepquestioning 4y ago
Why does Grace Hopper get a pass for outright lying for decades about this?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  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.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Right, she claims to have been there, but never claims to be the one who actually found it.
- DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
  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
- eesmith 4y ago
  She never did. She's told the story many times - eg, https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopper-howard-aiken-th_1000425230042 https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12 - and never claimed she coined the term.
drekipus 4y ago
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
itqwertz 4y ago
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.
mseepgood 4y ago
Good stories are more powerful than the truth.
jamesfinlayson 4y ago
I vaguely recall the first time I read this story that Grace Hopper was not the person who found the moth.
- eesmith 4y ago
  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 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 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."
darkwater 4y ago
So, does anybody know why in telegraph jargon they started referring to "false signals" as "bugs"?
- pvtmert 4y ago
  probably due to clicking or chirping noise caused by old/rusty/faulty wires
- swalberg 4y ago
  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-term-bug/ https://infostory.com/2013/08/27/debugging-the-origin-of-the... talks a bit more about the bug trap and the false signals.
mrhektor 4y ago
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.
- type0 4y ago
  In those days people took pride in their handwriting, nowadays the best you can do is to brag about your LaTeX typesetting
  - mrhektor 4y ago
    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-future-of-handwriting https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...
    - The_Stone 4y ago
      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.
      - mrhektor 4y ago
        You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left
        gumby 4y ago
        Faster and with better retentIon when taking notes in meetings (or classes).
jpswade 4y ago
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story right?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kryptiskt 4y ago
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.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  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.
- wrp 4y ago
  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.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?id=2444 https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?id=24...
- labrador 4y ago
  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.
  - JdeBP 4y ago
    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.
grahamlee 4y ago
How long before the Nikola Tesla fans turn up to tell us that his bugs were more catastrophic than Edison’s anyway?
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  "We'll have you know that Soviet microchips are the biggest microchips in the whole world!"
susam 4y ago
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.
- pingpongrandom 4y ago
  Yep, nobody got presented awards for the "First World War".
  - phire 4y ago
    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.
    - Narretz 4y ago
      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
      - jcranmer 4y ago
        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).
psychoslave 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#History
AlbertoGP 4y ago
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/ 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 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 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_15-0 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/man2000010062/13rRUwInvM7 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.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
The story of the first "computer bug" is a pile of history
globular-toast 4y ago
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.
simonh 4y ago
Fun story with legendary status that's clearly not meant to be taken seriously != a pile of lies. Offensive, scummy, barrel scraping clickbait nonsense.
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  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.
noindiecred 4y ago
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.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  > 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.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    I decided to research it. It doesn't appear that the furniture was first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_(room)#History 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/20.500.14106/A04619/A04619.html?sequence=5&isAllowed=y 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 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 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_(Ghirlandaio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_(Ghi... 1478 - https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/malesskircher-gabriel/saint-mark-evangelist https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/malesskir... 1500 - http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/14/77089 http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/14/77089 I don't see how they particularly inform the modern study.
zoomablemind 4y ago
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.
JdeBP 4y ago
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.
SamLL 4y ago
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.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm...
- dralley 4y ago
  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.
fortran77 4y ago
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.
taylodl 4y ago
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.
- csours 4y ago
  The human mind works on narratives, from myths and legends to research papers and court cases.
tiborsaas 4y ago
It bugs me a bit when people call myths lies.
valbaca 4y ago
> 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.
- thayne 4y ago
  > 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
  - ezrast 4y ago
    It was even the winning question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: https://millionaire.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Trela https://millionaire.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Trela
Demonsult 4y ago
Still a smaller pile of lies than the Ada Lovelace story.
- eesmith 4y ago
  "Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace" - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t...
AlbertCory 4y ago
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.
- beeboop 4y ago
  Video for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jFcaj3ovk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jFcaj3ovk
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thanks. I thought I remembered she had a microsecond, too, but I wasn't sure so I left that out.

189 points by funOtter 4y ago

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.”)

keepquestioning 4y ago

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

woodruffw 4y ago
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.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Right, she claims to have been there, but never claims to be the one who actually found it.
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
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
eesmith 4y ago
She never did. She's told the story many times - eg, https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopper-howard-aiken-th_1000425230042 https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12 - and never claimed she coined the term.

drekipus 4y ago

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

itqwertz 4y ago

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.

mseepgood 4y ago

Good stories are more powerful than the truth.

jamesfinlayson 4y ago

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

eesmith 4y ago
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 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 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."

darkwater 4y ago

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

pvtmert 4y ago
probably due to clicking or chirping noise caused by old/rusty/faulty wires
swalberg 4y ago
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-term-bug/ https://infostory.com/2013/08/27/debugging-the-origin-of-the... talks a bit more about the bug trap and the false signals.

mrhektor 4y ago

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.

type0 4y ago
In those days people took pride in their handwriting, nowadays the best you can do is to brag about your LaTeX typesetting
- mrhektor 4y ago
  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-future-of-handwriting https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...
  - The_Stone 4y ago
    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.
    - mrhektor 4y ago
      You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left
      - gumby 4y ago
        Faster and with better retentIon when taking notes in meetings (or classes).

jpswade 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kryptiskt 4y ago

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.

woodruffw 4y ago
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.
wrp 4y ago
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.
- dboreham 4y ago
  https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?id=2444 https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?id=24...
labrador 4y ago
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.
- JdeBP 4y ago
  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.

grahamlee 4y ago

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

Joker_vD 4y ago
"We'll have you know that Soviet microchips are the biggest microchips in the whole world!"

susam 4y ago

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.

pingpongrandom 4y ago
Yep, nobody got presented awards for the "First World War".
- phire 4y ago
  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.
  - Narretz 4y ago
    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
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      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).

psychoslave 4y ago

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

AlbertoGP 4y ago

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/ 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 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 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_15-0 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/man2000010062/13rRUwInvM7 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.

upsidesinclude 4y ago

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

globular-toast 4y ago

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.

simonh 4y ago

Fun story with legendary status that's clearly not meant to be taken seriously != a pile of lies. Offensive, scummy, barrel scraping clickbait nonsense.

mikebenfield 4y ago
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.

noindiecred 4y ago

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.

a9h74j 4y ago
> 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.
- eesmith 4y ago
  I decided to research it. It doesn't appear that the furniture was first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_(room)#History 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/20.500.14106/A04619/A04619.html?sequence=5&isAllowed=y 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 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 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_(Ghirlandaio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_(Ghi... 1478 - https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/malesskircher-gabriel/saint-mark-evangelist https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/malesskir... 1500 - http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/14/77089 http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/14/77089 I don't see how they particularly inform the modern study.

zoomablemind 4y ago

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.

JdeBP 4y ago

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.

SamLL 4y ago

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

dralley 4y ago
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.

fortran77 4y ago

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.

taylodl 4y ago

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.

csours 4y ago
The human mind works on narratives, from myths and legends to research papers and court cases.

tiborsaas 4y ago

It bugs me a bit when people call myths lies.

valbaca 4y ago

> 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.

thayne 4y ago
> 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
- ezrast 4y ago
  It was even the winning question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: https://millionaire.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Trela https://millionaire.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Trela

Demonsult 4y ago

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

eesmith 4y ago
"Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace" - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t...

AlbertCory 4y ago

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.

beeboop 4y ago
Video for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jFcaj3ovk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jFcaj3ovk
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thanks. I thought I remembered she had a microsecond, too, but I wasn't sure so I left that out.