Grace Hopper and The Bug

[Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879]

>From article <28385 at mimsy.umd.edu>, by tewok at tove.cs.umd.edu (Uncle Wayne):
> 
> That may be true and I'm quite happy to believe that she didn't make
> these claims.  Unfortunately, I was never able to hear her speak and so
> I don't have first-hand knowledge of her bug story.

I've heard Grace Murray Hopper speak (she was only a Captain at the time),
and when I did, she didn't claim to have found the moth personally, nor
did she claim to have made the log entry.  She did say that it happened
where she worked (Aiken's lab) and that, whenever the machine failed after
that, people would joke about there being another bug caught in the
relays.

By implication, this has been interpreted by many as her claim that the
word bug, as applied to problems with computers, originated with that
moth, but as others have noted, the verb to bug, meaning to annoy, may
date back to Shakespeare, and the noun bug, meaning an annoying technical
problem in a piece of equipment, dates back at least to Edison.
Furthermore, the log-book entry itself "first actual bug ..." suggests
that there had been many figurative bugs before it, and that this was the
first bug that was really a bug.
					Doug Jones
					jones at herky.cs.uiowa.edu