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The Bug in the Computer Bug Story (2022)

Soon after a team of engineers discovered a moth in a machine at Harvard, the word "bug" became a standard part of the programmer's lexicon. Or did it?

The story has been nearly canonized by the presence in the lab of Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering computer scientist who retired with the rank of Rear Admiral in the US Navy. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary’ s fourth definition of the noun “bug” reads “a defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like.” The OED cites the March 11, 1889, Pall Mall Gazette as a source: “Mr [Thomas] Edison… had been up the two previous nights discovering a ‘bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect had secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.” “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.”

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