On 9 September 1947, a US Navy technician fixed a fault in a Harvard Mark II computer by extracting a moth that was caught between the contacts of a relay in the system.

This well-documented event (you can see the log report complete with moth sticky-taped to it here) is often thought to be the origin of the terms, “bug” and “debug“, in reference to computer problems, something even Mail.app suffers from time to time.

But it’s not true.

According to Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Language Myths (Penguin, 2005), this use of bug is much older.

He cites a report in the Pall Mall Gazette from 1889 about the inventor Thomas Edison:

Mr Edison, I was informed, 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.

And he suggests that it might be even older. An electrical handbook published in 1896 mentions that the term was first used jokingly by telegraph operators to explain that noisy lines were caused by insects invading the telegraph wires.

The legacy of nineteenth century proto-phone-phreakers?

(Holiday reading).

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Tags: bug, computer, computer problems, debug, Harvard Mark II, insect, mail.app, moth, phreakers, telegraph operators, Thomas Edison

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 11th January, 2006 at 12:27 am and is filed under Apple Mail Bugs, Apple Mail Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.