Computer Bug

On August 1, 2012 Knights Capital Group lost $440 million due to a computer bug. 

The question is where did the term "bug" come from?

Because the company is a middle man in Wall Street 148 other companies were also affected. Knights Capital would no longer exist because of this single bug if it hadn't been fixed by a coalition of other companies led by the largest independent bank in the U. S., Jefferies, which then became Knights Capital's biggest stock holder.

This raises many questions, like: are computers really worth it? where do all these bugs come from? Why is my ice cream green? etc. Then eventually, after three or four hours of brainstorming with a cappuccino's welcome aid, you'll ask yourself "Why do we call them bugs anyway? This thing's more like a dragon!" That is a very good question to ask yourself, because that's the one we'll answer here.

The word "bug" in reference to a computer glitch has been dealt with many times before. Remember when your cousin told your sister that they're called bugs because the weird noises in early telephone calls were called "bugs in the line"? I'm going to try to be a little bit more scientific than that.

The use of the word "bug" to describe computer failures goes back an indefinitely long time. Grace Hopper coined "debug" when she pulled a dead moth out of one of her malfunctioning computers, but she never claimed to invent "bug" itself. In fact Grace Hopper remembers Radar technicians calling fake readings in their radars "bugs" all the way back in World War II. Even on the log (where she tapped the insect) she said "first actual case of bug being found" showing that she was not the first to use "bug"

One explanation for the origin of our word "bug" is that it untraceably filtered in from engineering jargon. The first use of the word bug was much before any computers computed, in fact its first use was by Edison, way back in 1878.

 

Apparently he and his company used it often because a friend of Edison's heard it enough to mention his theory on it's origins to another friend, that they were called bugs because of the notion that a bug got into the machine and messed it up. That lead won't go too much farther unless we find out what a friend of the friend of Edison's friend's sister said to his fifth cousin about it, but barring that there is one last point to turn, word roots.

The word "bug" all on it's own comes from an obsolete Welsh root that means "ghost" or "something scary" in Middle English. Perhaps, in the days when when bad weather was blamed on bad spirits a broken wheel was blamed on a "bwg" (Welsh spelling)?

So was it Edison being funny, evil insects, or malicious ghosts that gave us nothing but an understatement to describe Knights Capital's disaster? You decide.