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1993-02-14
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Setting the Record Straight: Grace Murray Hopper's Bug
By: Larry Clark, Sacremento Users Group
When Grace Murray Hopper died on January 1, 1992, the computer
industry lost one of its giants.
Dr. Hopper's computing career began in 1943 when she left Yale's
mathematics department to join the U.S. Naval Reserve as one of three
coders for Harvard's Mark I computer. In 1949, still in the Reserve,
she joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer as a programmer on the Univac I
(later acquired by Remington-Rand and then Sperry). She is credited
with developing the first compiler in 1952, and subsequently, with
developing a forerunner of COBOL.
She was forced to retire from the Naval Reserve in 1966 because of her
age (then 60), but within a year, the Navy recalled her to help
standardize Navy programming languages. She eventually retired from
active duty with the rank of Rear Admiral in 1986, at age 80; then
joined DEC as a consultant.
Obituaries in popular and computer publications noted Dr. Hopper's
important contributions to the computer field. Many also credited her
with one contribution that is almost certainly untrue: coining the
word "bug" to mean a program error. Without taking anything away
from the " first lady of programming," I want to debunk this myth.
The word "bug" has been used to describe anomalies in electrical and
mechanical equipment since long before the famous incident on the Mark
II. The definition of "bug" in the Encyclopedia of Word and
Phrase Origins includes the passage:
Bug in the sense of a defect ( "This new model car has a lot of
bugs in it" ) does not derive from the moths that supposedly
plagued the first U.S. experimental computers in the 1940s, as
the old story goes. Used long before then, bug is most likely a
form of "bogey" (q.v.), in this case, " a real thing that
causes worry. " [Robert Hendrickson, Facts on File Encyclopedia
of Word and Phrase Origins, Facts on File, Inc., 1987, ISBN
0-8160-1012-9]
Charles Williamson, who shares my interest in computing history,
recently lent me some audio tapes from the History of Languages
Conference conducted in June 1978 by SIGPLAN (the Association for
Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for Programming
LANguages). The highlight of the conference was a banquet at which
many legendary pioneers of the industry traded anecdotes from the
"good old days." Among them was Dr. Grace Hopper, whose tales
included the following:
It was the summer of '45 when we were building the Mark II. We had
to build it in an awful rush "it was wartime" and so it was
built out of components we could get our hands on, out of relays.
We were working in a World War I "temporary" building.
[laughter] It was a very hot summer, no air conditioning, so all
the windows were open. And Mark II stopped.
We were trying to get her going. We finally found the relay that
was failing. These were large relays, and inside the relay that
had failed, beaten to death by the contacts of the relay, was a
moth about this big. We got a pair of pliers, and we very
carefully got the moth out of the relay, put it in the log book,
and put Scotch tape over it.
Now, Howard Aiken had a habit of coming out of the machine room
and saying, "Are you making any numbers?" "and we had to have
an excuse when we weren't making any numbers. From then on, if we
weren't making any numbers, we told him that we were "debugging
" the computer. [laughter and applause] To the best of my
knowledge, that's where it started. [laughter]
I'm delighted to report to you that, about two or three months
ago, I saw the bug again. You'll all be very glad to know that the
first bug still exists [laughter], and it will very shortly be
placed in the Naval Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia."
There you have it, in Dr. Hopper's own words. It was a joke "a
play on words. The word "bug" (and probably "debug" ) had
long been associated with glitches, so she simply noted the
existence of a real bug in a facetious way.
Dr. Hopper (often called "Amazing Grace" ) was a great and
gracious lady, and one of the important pioneers of the computing
industry. Focusing so much attention on her oft-told anecdote (and
misinterpreting its message) does not do justice to her career;
her actual accomplishments were far more remarkable.