"Chip bug versus chip bug" - Photo courtesy of Windell Oskay (CC BY 2.0).
COMPUTERS have become an indispensable part of our lives, whether it be for work or personal use.
And nothing frustrates a computer user more than a technical malfunction; also known as a computer "bug". Many have speculated that the terminology came from a real incident where an insect made a computer malfunction.
Could it be true?
Verdict:
FALSE
No, the use of the term entered engineering jargon back in the late 19th century so it predates electronics and digital computers.
In fact, renowned inventor Thomas Edison was recorded as employing the term in his works.
Author Isaac Asimov even used the term "bug" to describe what was happening to a malfunctioning robot in his short story, "Catch that rabbit", which was published in 1944.
Saying that, the term "bug" started to become popular in the post-war years to describe a computer malfunction after an incident in 1947.
A page from the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer's log, featuring a dead moth that was removed from the device.
The one responsible for the fame of today’s widely-utilised term "bug", meanwhile, was none other than the computer scientist Grace Hopper, who incidentally discovered a moth in the hardware during a repair works.
Together with a team of engineers, Grace was fixing Harvard University’s early computer when she found a moth trapped in one of the computer parts, which was the reason behind the faulty computer.
She taped the moth in her logbook as part of record keeping. Hopper was aware of the term "bug" to describe malfunctions as wrote, "First actual case of a bug being found" underneath the taped moth.
Saying that, the moth discovery did spark the attention of other computer programmers, who then started incorporating the term "debugging" for computer coding and correcting processes.
And since then, finding "bugs" in software and computers has become a fixture in computer-speak.
References:
1. https://codinghero.ai/why-
4. "Chip bug versus chip bug" - https://www.flickr.com/
