All the devices that we use every day experience failures or bugs. No software is perfect, and therefore manufacturers are constantly releasing updates that fix bugs , and in other cases introduce them. But, why do we call these failures that occur in programs, applications, operating systems and hardware a bug?
The last study that was carried out on the cost of bugs was carried out in 2002, and this estimated that the cost of bugs is equivalent to 0.6% of the GDP of the United States (about 60,000 million dollars that year) . The number has probably risen as we are increasingly reliant on software, and we all experience crashes, slowdowns, or software that makes our day-to-day life difficult.
Edison, the first to associate a bug with a bug
Colloquially we call these bugs bugs , but it is not known exactly when they began to be called that. Many historians seem to agree that it all stems from Thomas Edison in 1878, where he used the term ” bug ” to refer to a difficult problem that required a solution, or a design-level flaw that required a solution. Specifically, in the letter he wrote that “he had found a ‘bug’ in his device.”
Thus, it is possible that he was the first to coin it, or that it was common to use it in his close circle. The Oxford English Dictionary cites in 1889 an example related to Edison describing the bug as a metaphor for an insect entering a device and causing it to fail, since Edison mentions it in the letter in reference to a bug having entered a device. phone you were working on.
Ada Lovelace: acknowledging human flaws
However, Edison was not the first person to recognize that a device could fail due to an error in its programming. Ada Lovelace , in 1843, wrote about the problem in reference to Chales Babbage’s Analytical Engine , stating that the mechanism that the machine uses to make calculations is free of errors, but humans who use it can enter the data incorrectly in the cards that were used to program them. This can lead to incorrect instructions, and therefore incorrect results, as can occur when programming any device.
Therefore, here we have both the first reference to a programming bug and the first reference to a bug as a design flaw. This debunks another popular belief, which stated that the first bug reference was made by Grace Hopper in 1947, when a moth entered the relays of a Harvard Mark II computer and caused it to fail. Hopper pasted the moth on the sheet and noted it as the “first case a bug has been found.” However, this was not the first reference to a bug as a failure, and it was not established that the moth was the real cause of the computer failure, since it had also been hit, indicating that it had continued to function after it entered.
