4 ms·

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 ho

• 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.