tewok@tove.cs.umd.edu (Uncle Wayne) (12/08/90)
In a recent article hunt@dg-rtp.rtp.dg.com writes: > >Well, I for one don't believe your father-in-law. I heard Grace >Hopper speak once while I was working in Massachusetts, and she told >the story exactly as related here by other folks. I have no reason >to doubt her. She's an extraordinary lady. > Believe or don't believe -- it makes no difference to me. I learned long ago to take everything politicians say with a pound of salt. (Anyone who doesn't think an admiral is a politician has a bit to learn.) From things I've heard of her, I have no doubt that she's an extraordinary person. That, however, doesn't make her right. It is quite easy to misremember facts. Stories easily mutate and facts easily change, often without being noticed, the longer one tells them. On the other hand, I know my father-in-law rather well and trust him implicitly. He has no reason to lie about this. He has (or is it had? -- I heard recently that she had died) no grudge against Adm. Hopper. He also wasn't on-duty when the bug was found, so he's not trying to get the "glory", such as it is, back for himself. Like I said, though, believe what you want. In a recent article jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org writes: > > FWIW, I've never heard Grace actually claim to be the person who actually > found the bug, and I'm not sure she ever even claimed to be on duty > at the time it was found. Certainly she has appropriated the story as > one of her staple items for any talk she gives, but I don't think she > crossed the line between "this is something that happened where I was > once employed" and "this is something which happened to me". > That may be true and I'm quite happy to believe that she didn't make these claims. Unfortunately, I was never able to hear her speak and so I don't have first-hand knowledge of her bug story. My article was in response to the stories I've heard over the net (which we all know is a reliable source of information :) that she claimed the bug as "hers". Ever since I first heard her bug story over the net I knew that Adm. Hopper was the one who found the bug. It was only recently that I was told the truth about the bug. For more comments about the "truth" of the new story, see my response above to hunt@dg-rtp.rtp.dg.com. Wayne Morrison
jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) (12/08/90)
From article <28385@mimsy.umd.edu>, by tewok@tove.cs.umd.edu (Uncle Wayne): > > That may be true and I'm quite happy to believe that she didn't make > these claims. Unfortunately, I was never able to hear her speak and so > I don't have first-hand knowledge of her bug story. I've heard Grace Murray Hopper speak (she was only a Captain at the time), and when I did, she didn't claim to have found the moth personally, nor did she claim to have made the log entry. She did say that it happened where she worked (Aiken's lab) and that, whenever the machine failed after that, people would joke about there being another bug caught in the relays. By implication, this has been interpreted by many as her claim that the word bug, as applied to problems with computers, originated with that moth, but as others have noted, the verb to bug, meaning to annoy, may date back to Shakespeare, and the noun bug, meaning an annoying technical problem in a piece of equipment, dates back at least to Edison. Furthermore, the log-book entry itself "first actual bug ..." suggests that there had been many figurative bugs before it, and that this was the first bug that was really a bug. Doug Jones jones@herky.cs.uiowa.edu