When is a bug not a bug?
The world of computing often resorts to biology when it wants the name for something undesirable so we have bugs, viruses and worms. But sometimes the bugs are more biological than you might expect.
We all know that "bugs" are glitches and problems with computer programs, but do you know where the name comes from? The use of the word bug to mean a problem dates back to the late 19th century, way before modern computers, but it was brought into the computing vernacular by Captain Grace Hopper of the US Navy, an early computing pioneer, when she was working on the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator back in 1945. When the machine failed to work, her team discovered an unfortunate moth had met an untimely end between one of the electrical relays. Being American, they referred to the moth as a "bug" and Hopper reported that they had debugged the computer, thus introducing the word debugging into popular usage. The insect which became unintentionally famous is today preserved at the Naval Computing Museum in Virginia.
In modern times we have used the names virus and worm to describe types of computer malware and it was reported in the Guardian recently that Mark Taylor of Yeovil suspected a worm when his laptop repeatedly crashed. When he took it for repair he was proved right, though not in the way he expected. A five inch long earthworm had somehow found its way into the machine's innards and become wrapped around the internal fan, causing the laptop to overheat. But unlike the more famous moth, this suicidal invertebrate which was "burnt to a frazzle" when it eliminated itself from the gene pool is unlikely to become more than a passing footnote in the history of computing.
19th March 2009