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The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

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Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...

Weirdly enough, I went through school before then and learned cursive and I only use it on receipts and the occasional bank check. It has little to do with cursive being taught and more to do with cursive, and handwriting in general, being irrelevant.

You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#24
post #9

I'd just like to say that Thomas Edison's handwriting in his letter is absolutely beautiful. It almost looks like it's been typed out on a computer using a funky font. It's funny how the handwriting of almost everyone I know is quite bad these days. My own is almost illegible! I wonder what everyone thinks about this general degradation in penmanship? I guess it's not really needed in this day and age, but there's so…

I wonder if anyone has made a font based on his handwriting.

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#25

The logbook entry only makes sense if "bug" is a pre-existing term for a glitch, otherwise the humor with the real bug would fall flat. So I never understood how anybody could claim that it was the origin of the term.

Right. This is an utterly bizarre thing to rebut: it's clear in context that the "bug" is a humorous reference to a common term (one that predates computers entirely).

The only false part of the entire story is the claim that Hopper invented the term which, to my knowledge, she never claimed. It's just computer apocrypha; the kind every field has.

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#27

I vaguely recall the first time I read this story that Grace Hopper was not the person who found the moth.

She says a male operator recorded it.

Here's an audio recording of Hopper relating that story: https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12.

You'll see she says "they found the failing relay" and "the operator got a pair of tweezers ... and below it he wrote “First actual case of bug being found.”"

https://chsi.harvard.edu/harvard-ibm-mark-1-language notes four terms which entered programming through the Mark I, not the Mark II. These are: "Loop", "Patch", "Library", and "Bug" - with images of the physical nature of the first three! For the latter it says (emphasis mine):

] The "Bug"

] Before 1944, electrical engineers already used the term "bug" to refer to hard-to-find physical defects that hindered the operation of an electric device. The Mark I team appropriated the term for unexpected problems in the "coding" of a problem. Above are cartoons drawn by Grace Hopper of the different types of bugs encountered during her work.

The paper "Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug" by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell (doi:10.1109/85.728224) date those cartoons to 1945, and gives other pre-Mark II examples of using 'bug' for the Mark I:

] I. B. Cohen has examined a photocopy of the logbook kept by Robert Campbell, a young physicist at the Computation Laboratory. It tersely summarizes hours spent finding and correcting errors. On 17 April 1944, Campbell wrote, "Ran test program. Mr. Durfee from I.B.M. was here to help us find 'bugs.'"

and Hopper writing "a debugging note to operators" in 1945/1946 and "errors in mathematics and tape bugs pursued and captured by Ensign Bloch and Ensign Campbell."

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#28

Why does Grace Hopper get a pass for outright lying for decades about this?

She never did. She's told the story many times - eg, https://archive.org/details/podcast_from-archives_grace-hopp... starting at 16:12 - and never claimed she coined the term.

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...

Weirdly enough, I went through school before then and learned cursive and I only use it on receipts and the occasional bank check. It has little to do with cursive being taught and more to do with cursive, and handwriting in general, being irrelevant.

Same here! And I used a typewriter for my essays at university. These days if I scribble things down its just a scrawl (not really printing or cursive to be honest).

Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies

#30
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those days people took pride in their handwriting, nowadays the best you can do is to brag about your LaTeX typesetting

Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...

I think this is basically mixing up cause and effect. Cursive has been dropped from the curriculum because no one writes in cursive anymore.
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