Where did the current term ‘bug’ come from?

Bugs - those little things that fly around your head and crawl up your leg - have a bad reputation.   If we are bugged, it means that either someone is annoying us or listening without our permission.  And if you have suffered from a computer bug, which most computer owners have, you know that bugs are not only annoying but can be very expensive.

How is it that we associate computer problems with a bug?  There are several theories but most trace back to Thomas Edison and the telegraph.  He was just 26 years old when he began his work on sending messages by wire in two directions by changing the direction of the current. 

But he had a problem with a false break when the current switched.  His solution was to isolate the unwanted break into a “bug trap.” 

Edison continued to expand the use of the word bug to describe problems that needed attention.  Bug appears frequently in his notes on incandescent lighting, “Awful lot of bugs still.” In 1878 He defined the word in a communication to his employee, Theodore Paskas, “This thing gives out and then that ‘Bug’ - as such little faults and difficulties are called - show themselves, and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success - or failure - is certainly reached.”

By 1892 the terms “bug” and “bug trap” had spread widely in the engineering community and were included in Thomas Sloane’s “Standard Electrical Dictionary.”   A  “bug” was defined as “any fault or trouble” and a “bug trap” as “any connection or arrangement for overcoming said bug.”

On September 9, 1947 there was a more literal manifestation of the idea of a computer bug.   A computer programmer, Navy Commander Grace Murray Hopper, was working on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer.

The computer wasn’t working properly so technicians began digging around in the machine to find the cause.  Low and behold they found a moth - yes a real live, well actually dead, moth - between panel F and relay # 70.  If you know where that is you know a lot more about computers than most of us.

The moth was retrieved and taped into the log book with the citation, presumably from the Commander herself, “First actual case of a bug being found.”   The whereabouts of the moth today are a bit unclear.  Some accounts say it is in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum in Virginia.  Others say it is kept at the History of American Technology which is a part of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

We do know that Commander Hopper’s work in computer languages including COBAL earned her the first ever Computer Science Man of the Year Award in 1969 and the National Medal of Technology in 1991.

Thomas Edison may have coined the term “bug” to describe a problem, but it was Grace Hopper who was the first person to actually “debug” a computer.  

Next Wednesday, September 9, is the 68th anniversary of that debugging and a good time to run an anti-virus “debugging” program on your computer.  Also a good time to salute Mr. Edison and Ms. Hopper.  They fixed a lot of bugs for us.