2784: Bugs Bug Engineers August 4, 2024

The popular tale of the term ‘bug’ in the context of technical glitches often centers around an incident involving early machine encountering problems caused by an actual insect. One involved a story of a bug getting caught in some factory machine, and another version of this tale involves computing pioneer Grace Hopper, who, according to legend, in 1947, found a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II, causing an error. Neither of these are true, and moreover the team at harvard even noted the incident in their logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found", implying that the term was already in popular.

In reality, the term "bug" has been used to describe mechanical malfunctions since at least the 19th century. Engineers and inventors, including Thomas Edison, referred to unexpected flaws or problems in their inventions as ‘bugs’. This usage probably stems from the general meaning of ‘bug’ as an unseen, troublesome creature or nuisance. Although a software bug is now the more common word, especially given how much more bug-prone code can be than traditional 19th century mechanics, its origins were not so serendipitous as the stories