[HN Gopher] The Bug in the Computer Bug Story (2022)
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       The Bug in the Computer Bug Story (2022)
        
       Author : refibrillator
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-08-26 15:50 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
        
       | drewcoo wrote:
       | Bug was clearly part of the lexicon already. Otherwise no one
       | would have written "First actual case of bug being found." And it
       | wouldn't have been so funny.
       | 
       | Pedant "debunking" obvious joke in a JSTOR article is pretty
       | funny in its own right, though. I hope Matthew Wills will explain
       | how chickens don't cross roads next!
        
         | drivers99 wrote:
         | It's apparently not obvious because I always see people
         | misunderstanding it (followed by corrections in the replies,
         | generally).[0]
         | 
         | [0] Random example:
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4g0j3r/til_the_firs...
         | 
         | And the article that reddit post links to is titled "First
         | computer bug found 66 years ago" which quotes it but fails the
         | notice the distinction between "first actual computer bug" and
         | "first actual case of bug being found" and turning that into
         | the reddit title "The first computer bug ever discovered was a
         | real insect: a moth trapped between the relays".
        
           | tedunangst wrote:
           | "This was litterally the first thing we were taught in
           | programming class at uni. You'd be surprised at how many
           | things actually makes sense if you know the story behind
           | them!"
           | 
           | Sigh.
        
         | commodoreboxer wrote:
         | The article addresses this:
         | 
         | > Computer people adopted a term in use for more than half a
         | century and brought it into the digital world. The wording in
         | the Harvard log book--"first actual case of a bug being found"
         | --suggests the computer programmers and engineers there were
         | already quite familiar with the time-honored usage and were
         | remarking on the novelty of finding an actual insect bugging up
         | the computer. "Debug," by the way, was also used in an 1945
         | issue of the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, which
         | Shapiro takes to suggest it was "probably preceded by several
         | years of oral use in engineering slang."
        
         | tedunangst wrote:
         | I've never heard the joke version of this story. It's only
         | people earnestly explaining that this is where the word _bug_
         | comes from. Or people debunking that.
         | 
         | "First actual bug" gets turned into "first bug was an actual
         | bug" in the retelling, and people are pretty insistent about
         | it.
        
         | Gravityloss wrote:
         | Schrodinger's cat is something that I have always assumed to
         | obviously be a joke and nobody was expected to argue it
         | literally.
        
           | dcminter wrote:
           | I like how it's expressed in Dirk Gently - "Schrodinger's Cat
           | isn't a real experiment. It's just an illustration for
           | arguing about the idea [...] Schrodinger put forward this
           | idea to illustrate what he thought was absurd about quantum
           | theory." -- Douglas Adams
        
       | plus wrote:
       | I mean, the sentence "The first actual case of a bug being found"
       | implies that "bug" was already being used in the context of a
       | malfunctioning computer. Otherwise, why would they write it?
        
       | kens wrote:
       | Debunking of the bug story as etymological folklore has been
       | going on since at least 1984. Every few years there's another
       | article about it (which is good for the daily 10,000.) The first
       | appears to have been in Byte magazine and then IEEE Annals of the
       | History of Computing in 1984. Followed by American Speech in 1987
       | and again in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing in 1998.
       | 
       | Links:
       | https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1984-07_OCR/page/n33/mod...
       | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4640793
       | https://doi.org/10.2307/455415
       | http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/arya/Papers/IEEE/HTML%20Docs/Computer%...
        
       | not2b wrote:
       | Grace Hopper joked about finding a literal bug, because "bug" was
       | already a term for a defect at the time. It it weren't, the joke
       | wouldn't make sense. There seems to be widespread confusion about
       | that, leading to people to write "debunking" stories every couple
       | of years.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-30 23:01 UTC)