[TUHS] Grace Hopper

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Mon Dec 10 02:19:00 AEST 2018


Hi Dave.

We went through this last year:

Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing 
> Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy.  She 
> coined the term "debugging"

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#Origin_of_the_term:

	The terms "bug" and "debugging" are popularly attributed to
	Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s.[1] While she was working on a
	Mark II computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered
	a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon
	she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. However,
	the term "bug", in the sense of "technical error", dates back
	at least to 1878 and Thomas Edison (see software bug for a
	full discussion). Similarly, the term "debugging" seems to have
	been used as a term in aeronautics before entering the world of
	computers. Indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper remarked that
	she was not coining the term[citation needed]. The moth fit
	the already existing terminology, so it was saved. A letter
	from J. Robert Oppenheimer (director of the WWII atomic bomb
	"Manhattan" project at Los Alamos, NM) used the term in a letter
	to Dr. Ernest Lawrence at UC Berkeley, dated October 27, 1944,[2]
	regarding the recruitment of additional technical staff.

Please update your notes ...

Thanks,

Arnold



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