[COFF] Origins of bugs (was: Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!)

[grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)]

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On Monday,  9 December 2019 at 10:50:50 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing
> Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy.  She coined
> the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay contacts from
> a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged" in the log, taping
> the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well.

FWIW, the term "debug" predates this incident.  OED has:

  1943 Bluefield (W. Va.) Daily Tel. 26 Mar. 10/4 (caption)
       ‘Debugging’ Buna. Sister Mary Thomas adjusts a gas absorption
       tube in her Washington laboratory where she's conducting
       research to eliminate ‘bugs’ from the processing of butadiene
       into synthetic rubber.

My understanding is that Hopper would have known this usage, and the
real point of this story was that she found a real live bug causing
the bug, a kind of physical pun.

Greg
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