bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of
hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of
feature. Examples: "There's a bug
in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system
crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has
a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few
personality problems).
Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing
pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a
technician solved a glitch in the
Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from
between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently
promulgated bug in its hackish sense as
a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit,
she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook
associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a
moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center
(NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the
moth taped into it, is recorded in the "Annals of the History of
Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285-286.
The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads
"1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug
being found". This wording establishes that the term was already
in use at the time in its current specific sense -- and Hopper
herself reports that the term `bug' was regularly applied to
problems in radar electronics during WWII.
Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was
already established in Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific
and rather modern use can be found in an electrical handbook from
1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo. Audel &
Co.) which says: "The term `bug' is used to a limited extent to
designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of
electric apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to
have originated in quadruplex telegraphy and have been
transferred to all electric apparatus."
The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of
the term; that it came from telephone company usage, in which
"bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. Though
this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may well be a distorted
memory of a joke first current among telegraph operators
more than a century ago!
Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that
the term "bug" was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy
to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that
would send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the
Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most common of this type)
even had a graphic of a beetle on them (and still do)! While the
ability to send repeated dots automatically was very useful for
professional morse code operators, these were also significantly
trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could take
some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots into
the code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In the
hands of an inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex "bug" on the line
could mean that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your
way.
Further, the term "bug" has long been used among radio
technicians to describe a device that converts electromagnetic
field variations into acoustic signals. It is used to trace radio
interference and look for dangerous radio emissions. Radio
community usage derives from the roach-like shape of the first
versions used by 19th century physicists. The first versions
consisted of a coil of wire (roach body), with the two wire ends
sticking out and bent back to nearly touch forming a spark gap
(roach antennae). The bug is to the radio technician what the
stethoscope is to the stereotype medical doctor. This sense is
almost certainly ancestral to modern use of "bug" for a covert
monitoring device, but may also have contributed to the use of
"bug" for the effects of radio interference itself.
Actually, use of `bug' in the general sense of a disruptive
event goes back to Shakespeare! (Henry VI, part III - Act V,
Scene II: King Edward: "So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die our
fear; For Warwick was a bug that fear'd us all.") In the first
edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of `bug' is "A
frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to
`bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster
which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced
into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games.
In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to
insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually
happened:
"There is a bug in this ant farm!"
"What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it."
"That's the bug."
A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found
in a paper by Fred R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the Computer
Bug: History and Folklore", American Speech 62(4):376-378.
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was
moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so
asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that
the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990,
your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had
unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it -- and
that the present curator of their History of American Technology
Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a
worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991,
but due to space and money constraints was not actually exhibited
years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the
original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way,
by making the myth true! --ESR]
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bug-compatible adj.
[common] Said of a design or revision that has been badly
compromised by a requirement to be compatible with fossils or misfeatures in other programs or (esp.)
previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path
separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as
an option character in 1.0."
Node:bug-for-bug
compatible, Next:bug-of-the-month club, Previous:bug-compatible, Up:= B =
bug-for-bug compatible n.
Same as bug-compatible,
with the additional implication that much tedious effort went
into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
Node:bug-of-the-month club,
Next:buglix, Previous:bug-for-bug
compatible, Up:= B =
bug-of-the-month club n.
[from "book-of-the-month club", a time-honored
mail-order-marketing technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which
users of `sendmail(8)' (the UNIX mail daemon) belong to; this was
coined on the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.unix at a time when
sendmail security holes, which allowed outside crackers access to the system, were being
uncovered at an alarming rate, forcing sysadmins to update very
often. Also, more completely, `fatal security bug-of-the-month
club'. See also kernel-of-the-week club.