Google Honors Grace Hopper...and a "bug"

Today's Google Doodle honors Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Admiral of the Cybersea. The doodle also contains a little Entomological (Etymological?) surprise at the end: a moth.

Hopper received her PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. She left a faculty position at Vassar to join the Navy in 1943, and was assigned to work on the “Mark I Electromechanical Computing Machine.” It was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, and 8 feet deep. From there, Hopper went on to work in academia, industry, and the military, staying on the cutting edge of computing. Her best known innovation is the compiler, but she is also responsible for COBOL, FORTRAN, and many other computing innovations.

Whether or not Hopper coined the term “computer bug” is a source of some controversy. The Navy promotes the idea that it was Hopper that squashed the first computer bug; there is an actual photo of the offending insect on Hopper’s US Navy webpage:

Somehow, “computer moth” just doesn’t have the same resonance.

If you dig a little deeper, though, it appears the use of “bug” to describe a technical problem has a complex history–and in fact, may not have originated with Grace Hopper at all:

“The OED Supplement records sense (4b) of the noun bug (“a defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like”) as early as 1889. In that year the Pall Mall Gazette reported (11 Mar: 1) that ‘Mr. 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 has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.’….

This meaning was common enough by 1934 to be recognized in Webster’s New International Dictionary: ‘bug, n…. 3. A defect in apparatus or its operation… Slang, U.S.’” (citation)

So, the “actual bug” notation in the lab notebook above probably reflects the amusement of the technician at finding a physical bug, when the word bug was already in use as slang for a problem.

It does appear that the term “debugging” came into use around Hopper's time period, but I haven’t seen any evidence firmly tying it to this particular moth. Oh well.

BTW, The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the largest technical conference for women in computing. Get involved!