IT Myths: Buggin' out - the history of a word we all hate

Computer bugs – a technological term that's entered common parlance among techies and laymen alike – so when it came down to discovering just who invented the term for the bane of programmers the world over, readers were happy to put more than the usual suspects in the frame.

The mechanical glitches or 'bugs' that plagued early techies, it seems, may have been exactly that – literally, assorted creepy crawlies that were intent on committing hara-kiri by throwing themselves into the innermost circuitry of machines.

One such set of suicidal creepy crawlies keen to bring the fledgling IT industry to its knees were US cotton weevils, said reader Lionel Barker.

"These little creatures drift on the wind to find fresh feeding grounds and the inevitable happened - drawn into the intimate dark internals of the early 'mainframes' they found what seemed an endless supply of... cotton, and started munching!

"With the cotton insulation removed, the conductors touched, the machine malfunctioned and the rest is history," he wrote. The most common and (somewhat erroneously) accepted explanation for the origin of the term 'bug', however, stems from an incident involving software pioneer and IT's earliest first lady, Grace Murray Hopper.

In the 1940s, Hopper - responsible for inventing the compiler and playing a significant part in the creation of COBOL – was a Naval Reserve, working on the Harvard Mark II computer.

She managed to solve a glitch which had temporarily shut down the machine by removing a two-inch long - and somewhat fried - moth from one of the relays, which she then pasted into the logbook. The moth, which reputedly spawned the term 'bug', went on to enjoy its own taste of posthumous fame. Apparently it and the logbook in question spent a few years on display in a case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

Although Hopper is undeniably credited with coining the phrase 'debug', rumour has it that Harvard staff had been calling problems with their technology 'bugs' for some time before – a rumour backed up by Hopper's logbook entry of "First actual case of bug being found" - the origin of the term is thought to originate much earlier.

silicon.com reader Malcolm Rosier highlighted that the term bug in its modern sense was already in use in the nineteenth century and may spring from the days of early telegraphy. Martin referred 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… even had a graphic of a beetle on them!

"While the ability to send repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional Morse code operators… 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," he wrote.

Another plausible explanation rooted in the early days of IT was suggested by silicon.com reader Nigel Rawlins who told us: "Early computers were merely information processors and the data was fed via perforated tape or card. It was this cellulose material that was so attractive to numerous insects and their larvae. These 'bugs' would attack the data storage media leaving additional perforations to be read by the processing equipment. As a result the data was rendered useless due to the voracious appetites of the bugs - hence the terminology."

An equally credible but more prosaic explanation came courtesy of reader Roger Miller who attributed the term to the first software developers. "When an error in code was located in the olden days they were marked with a 'bug' which in today's language would be called a bookmark," he wrote.

However, to the chagrin of techies the world over, the term started life way before even Babbage got a handle on computing. The term 'bug', used to mean an irritant or unpleasant thing, has been part of the English language since the sixteenth century. So while Hopper, Edison, cotton weevils, programmers et al have all had a hand in popularising the term, the Tudors probably got there first.