When I was a child I asked my father “why?”and he told me that the bug was a cockroach flipping a bit in core memory - which was a grid of wires where each bit was a little magnetic donut.
Thanks! Sent from my iPhone > On Jun 30, 2023, at 6:36 AM, Keith N. McKenna <keith.mcke...@comcast.net> > wrote: > > I came across this bit of trivia on a news group I follow: > > PS --- don't you love the term "bug". Where I used to work, they had the late > Grace Murray Hopper in to give us a talk every few years. One of her > anecdotes of the early days was how the term came about. One time a "down" > was caused by an insect getting into the machine and causing a short. Could > just picture the glee of those people as youngsters as they attached the > specimen* and pages and pages about its life cycle, etc. to the hated > "problem report" they were required to submit for every "down" as a sort of > protest. So naturally, the next time they came over with a report on a down > the response was "OK, what kind of a bug was it this time". > > * They had sent over to the Smithsonian for an ID and as much information > about it as possible, so they had a LOT of pages to append. > > Regards > Keith > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
