73 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
73 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
bug
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n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware,
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esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. Examples:
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There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards. The system
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crashed because of a hardware bug. Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs
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(i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).
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Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better
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known for inventing COBOL ) liked to tell a story in which a technician
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solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect
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out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently
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promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though,
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as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many
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years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in
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question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center
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(NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped
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into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing , Vol. 3, No.
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3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (from September 9,
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1947), reads 1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of
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bug being found. This wording establishes that the term was already in use
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at the time in its current specific sense and Hopper herself reports that
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the term bug was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during
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WWII. The original bug (the caption date is incorrect) Indeed, the use of
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bug to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's
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time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in an
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electrical handbook from 1896 ( Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity ,
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Theo. Audel Co.) which says: The term bug is used to a limited extent to
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designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric
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apparatus. It further notes that the term is said to have originated in
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quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus.
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The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that
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it came from telephone company usage, in which bugs in a telephone cable
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were blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it
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may well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among telegraph
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operators more than a century ago! Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the
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field inform us that the term bug was regularly used in the early days of
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telegraphy to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that
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would send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex
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keyers (which were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of
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a beetle on them (and still do)! While the ability to send repeated dots
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automatically was very useful for professional morse code operators, these
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were also significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it
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could take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into
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the code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In the hands of an
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inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex bug on the line could mean that a lot of
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garbled Morse would soon be coming your way. Further, the term bug has long
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been used among radio technicians to describe a device that converts
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electromagnetic field variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace
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radio interference and look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio community
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usage derives from the roach-like shape of the first versions used by 19th
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century physicists. The first versions consisted of a coil of wire (roach
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body), with the two wire ends sticking out and bent back to nearly touch
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forming a spark gap (roach antennae). The bug is to the radio technician
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what the stethoscope is to the stereotypical medical doctor. This sense is
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almost certainly ancestral to modern use of bug for a covert monitoring
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device, but may also have contributed to the use of bug for the effects of
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radio interference itself. Actually, use of bug in the general sense of a
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disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V,
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Scene II: King Edward: So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die our fear; For
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Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all. ) In the first edition of Samuel
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Johnson's dictionary one meaning of bug is A frightful object; a walking
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spectre ; this is traced to bugbear , a Welsh term for a variety of
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mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been
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reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In
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any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a
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plausible conversation that never actually happened: There is a bug in this
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ant farm! What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it. That's the bug. A
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careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a paper by
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Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, Entomology of the Computer Bug: History and Folklore
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, American Speech 62(4):376-378. It helps to remember that this dates
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from 1973. (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-10-31. The
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previous cartoon was 73-07-24.
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