On 21 Oct 98, Christie Mason wrote:
> Wasn't there also an Admiral Grace who helped coin the phrase "bug" after
> one of their programs (vacuum tube days) wouldn't run and they found a
> real bug in the system that was shorting out the connection which lead to
> "debugging"?
Well... not so much coined the expression (although she's often credited
with that), as perhaps popularized it because of her 1947 encounter with
a moth.
>From the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 20, No. 4, October-
December 1998, "Stalking the Elusive Bug":
"From at least the time of Thomas Edison, U.S. engineers have
used the word "bug" to refer to flaws in the systems they
developed. This short word conveniently covered a multitude of
possible problems. It also suggested that difficulties were small
and could be easily corrected. IBM engineers who installed the
ASSC Mark I at Harvard University in 1944 taught the phrase to
the staff there. Grace Murray Hopper used the word with
particular enthusiasm in documents relating to her work. In 1947,
when technicians building the Mark II computer at Harvard
discovered a moth in one of the relays, they saved it as the
first actual case of a bug being found."
Also of interest is the "Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing",
a conference last held in 1997 and next scheduled for 2000.
http://www.sdsc.edu/Hopper/
And for a photo of the actual bug in question:
http://www.sdsc.edu/Hopper/Bug.GIF
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
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