Robert X. Cringely, my favorite tech pundit, had an interesting aside in this week’s column (which is otherwise about Apple and Blu-Ray). He ran across a use of the term ‘bug’ to mean a glitch in a technical system in a magazine article from the 1930s. I found this fascinating, since we always assume “we” invented the term when computers came along. He closes with this:
How old is the term 'bug'?
)
Greg Langmead
Machine Learning Engineer
I am a software engineer and mathematician. I work on NLP algorithms for Apple News, and research homotopy type theory in CMU’s philosophy department.