Link Banana

PBS’s Cringley can be a little sloppy. This week, after a long column about how Apple really should include Blu-ray drives on it’s computers (true, but only moderately interesting), he dropped something of a bomb. I’d always heard that this was origin of the word “bug” in technology:

was that a malfunction in the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1947 was traced to a dead moth that in its last living act had shorted out a circuit card. They taped the moth carcass in the computer logbook and history was made.

It turns out, the moth story isn’t right. Bug “was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878.”