>
> First, peace, Joanna. Ravi's post teaches me to word things
> more carefully. Right now, the etymology of "bug" need not
> concern the list, and I should not have thrown it out. It
> only distracts from the issue, the obsolescence of programmers.
>
i agree, but your reference to my post puzzles me. joanne bujes corrected your reference to the use of the word "bug", by pointing to grace hopper's use of it, though you had kind of anticipated that correction in your original post:
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0112/1879.html
john taber:
>
> The word "bug" comes from old
> engineering and means a malfunctioning machine that is somehow
> insane. Thomas Alva Edison used it in his notes. <...>
> The story that it came from a moth beaten
> to death in a relay of the Mark I computer is folk etymology.
>
i responded to joanna by agreeing with your statement above in my
post:
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0064.html
ravi:
>
> actually the original poster's etymology is more consistent with the
> current notion that the term predates computer software and hardware.
>
kelley backed this up with some references in her post:
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/0066.html
kelley:
>
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bug.html
> http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm
>
the first link above for instance says:
> Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer
> better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a
> technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling
> an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays,
> and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke
> about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not
> there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with
> the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a
> display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire
> story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is
> recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3
> (July 1981), pp. 285-286.
>
> The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545
> Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being
> found". This wording establishes that the term was already in use at
> the time in its current specific sense -- and Hopper herself reports
> that the term `bug' was regularly applied to problems in radar
> electronics during WWII.
>
> Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was already
> established in Thomas Edison's time...
--ravi