PS -- know why we call them "bugs"? << the origin of the tern >>
The story i was told many years ago was a dead moth shorting out some core
memory module (or somesuch) in the very early days of stored programming.
Well ...... sort of yes, but how the term came about makes a whole lot
more sense when you heard it from one of the people who were there. In
my case, from the late , Adm. Grace Murray Hopper << where I used to
work had her come and address all us IT folks >>
Those were the days of WWII and these early machines were being used for
code cracking.
See, they were required to fill out lengthy reports explaining each
outage. Which naturally got these bright young things POed, as hardware
outages were very frequent and they felt that a waste of their time,
busy as they were busy trying to crack cyphers. Well one day the outage
was caused by this insect causing a short. They decided, they want us to
waste our time writing lengthy reports explaining EXACTLY why, then they
can waste their time reading EXACTLY why. They sent the offending insect
over to the Smithsonian asking for ALL the information available on the
specimen and when the Smithsonian sent them back the information <<
scientific name, description, what it ate, what ate it, life cycle, etc.
>> they included all of that in their report.
The next time they submitted an outage report, the response was "OK,
what kind of a bug was it this time?". And the name stuck.
She also used to hand out "nanoseconds" --- lengths of copper wire which
represented the distance electrons could go (in wire) in a nanosecond.
To drive home that the physical sizes of machines imposed limits on how
fast they could be.
Michael D Novack
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