Pedant "debunking" obvious joke in a JSTOR article is pretty funny in its own right, though. I hope Matthew Wills will explain how chickens don't cross roads next!
[0] Random example: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4g0j3r/til_the_firs...
And the article that reddit post links to is titled "First computer bug found 66 years ago" which quotes it but fails the notice the distinction between "first actual computer bug" and "first actual case of bug being found" and turning that into the reddit title "The first computer bug ever discovered was a real insect: a moth trapped between the relays".
Sigh.
"First actual bug" gets turned into "first bug was an actual bug" in the retelling, and people are pretty insistent about it.
> Computer people adopted a term in use for more than half a century and brought it into the digital world. The wording in the Harvard log book—“first actual case of a bug being found”—suggests the computer programmers and engineers there were already quite familiar with the time-honored usage and were remarking on the novelty of finding an actual insect bugging up the computer. “Debug,” by the way, was also used in an 1945 issue of the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, which Shapiro takes to suggest it was “probably preceded by several years of oral use in engineering slang.”
Links: https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1984-07_OCR/page/n33/mod... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4640793 https://doi.org/10.2307/455415 http://ivizlab.sfu.ca/arya/Papers/IEEE/HTML%20Docs/Computer%...
