Like Edison, she (Grace Hopper) was recalling the word’s older origins in the Welsh bwg, the Scottish bogill or bogle, the German bögge, and the Middle English bugge: the hobgoblins of pre-modern life, resurrected in the 19th century as, to paraphrase philosopher Gilbert Ryle, ghosts in the machine.

Electrical circuits can have "bad connections" so I do wonder if Edison coined this word based on "ghost like" faults that magically appear and disappear!

-- Bakul

On Jun 15, 2021, at 8:48 PM, Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

There are citations from Edison in the 19th century using the word, and a quote somewhere by Maurice Wilkes about the stairwell moment when he realized much of the rest of his life would be spent finding programming errors.

That moth was not the first bug, nor the first "bug", it was the first recorded "actual bug".

-rob

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 9:46 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 6:55 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 6:25 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:
As not being hard-to-the-core i may have missed it, but also in
1951, in March, the wonderful Grace Hopper "conceives the first
compiler, called A-O and later released as Math-Matic. Hopper is
also credited with coining the term 'bug' following an incident
involving a moth and a Mark II.

Yes, but wrongly. The label next to the moth is "First actual case of bug being found", and the word "actual" shows that the slang term already existed then. Brief unexplained faults on telephony (and before that telegraphy) lines were "bugs on the line" back in the 19C. Vibroplex telegraph keys, first sold in 1905, had a picture of a beetle on the top of the key, and were notorious for creating bugs when inexperienced operators used them. (Vibroplex is still in business, still selling its continuous-operation telegraph keys, which ditt as long as you hold the paddle to the right.)

Indeed, the Vibroplex key is called a "bug". I suspect this has something to do with its appearance more than anything else, though (it kinda sorta looks like, er, a bug).

- Dan C.