9 Dec
2019
9 Dec
'19
12:56 a.m.
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)
âDebuggingâ Buna. Sister Mary Thomas adjusts a gas absorption
tube in her Washington laboratory where she's conducting
research to eliminate âbugsâ 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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