Bugs, moths, grasshoppers, and whales
Citation for published version (APA):
Marinissen, E. J. (2008). Bugs, moths, grasshoppers, and whales. IEEE Design and Test of Computers, 25(3), 288-288. https://doi.org/10.1109/MDT.2008.59
DOI:
10.1109/MDT.2008.59
Document status and date: Published: 01/01/2008 Document Version:
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IEEE Design & Test of Computers
Special Issue on ‘Silicon Debug and Diagnosis’, May 2008
The Last Byte
On Bugs, Moths, Grasshoppers, and Whales
by Erik Jan Marinissen – NXP Semiconductors
Popular wisdom has it that the term “debug” dates back to 1947, when a team under leadership of admiral Grace Hopper working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken (yes, that is ‘Aiken’, and not ‘Aitken’!) Relay Calculator removed a moth trapped between one of the relays. The team affixed the moth in their log book, and wrote next to it: “First actual case of bug being found”. The log, originally kept in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia, finally made it into the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. in 1991, after originally being refused, signaling recognition of the increased societal impact of computer bugs, at least in the view of the museum’s curator.
Is the term ‘bug’ based on poor arthropod knowledge in Hopper’s team? Should this Special Issue of Design & Test in fact have been called ‘Silicon Demothing and Diagnosis’, if only to honor the poor animal that now, taped to the log page, spends its days in a museum? How would you like it to be on a Smithsonian display as archetypal monkey? If Hopper’s team got to pick their favorite insect name free from true biological nomenclature, they should have called it a grasshopper, in recognition of their team leader. Fortunately, all this does not seem to be the case. Etymological research indicates that both the terms ‘bug’ and ‘debug’ existed before Hopper’s discovery in 1947. Thomas Edison already used the word ‘bug’ for “little faults and difficulties” in a letter to an associate in 1878; and the 1945 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary already had an entry for ‘debug’. Hopper’s team merely conformed to existing engineering speak.
The history of bugs and debug is well-documented on the Internet, although most stories are about software bugs, since the Internet is a software-dominated medium, after all. The hardware equivalent of software bugs are design errors. Next to those, micro-electronics suffer from manufacturing defects; not an issue for software, as their manufacturing process is apparently near-perfect. The hardware community most commonly uses the term ‘debug’ for locating and resolving design errors, where the term ‘diagnosis’ refers to pinpointing the cause and location of manufacturing defects. Was it a design problem that moths could enter the Mark II computer? Given the hardware at the time, the incident seems closer to a manufacturing defect.
What remains most intriguing to me in all this is the choice of animal. Bugs, moths, and grasshoppers are small and perhaps hard to find, yet, once located, easy for a human to defeat. However, some design errors have consequences of giant proportions. All hands on deck, I need to start de-whaling my next chip design!
Erik Jan Marinissen is senior principal scientist at NXP Semiconductors in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Contact him at erik.jan.marinissen@nxp.com.
