It has been just so in all of my inventions. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878:
#Easy mark software software#
The term "bug" to describe defects has been a part of engineering jargon since the 1870s and predates electronic computers and computer software it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. The Middle English word bugge is the basis for the terms " bugbear" and " bugaboo" as terms used for a monster. In 2002, a study commissioned by the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that "software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the US economy an estimated $59 billion annually, or about 0.6 percent of the gross domestic product". This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by Computer Weekly convinced a House of Lords inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft's engine-control computer. In June 1994, a Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter crashed into the Mull of Kintyre, killing 29. In 1996, the European Space Agency's US$1 billion prototype Ariane 5 rocket had to be destroyed less than a minute after launch due to a bug in the on-board guidance computer program.
#Easy mark software code#
Bugs in code that controlled the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine were directly responsible for patient deaths in the 1980s. Some software bugs have been linked to disasters. Other bugs qualify as security bugs and might, for example, enable a malicious user to bypass access controls in order to obtain unauthorized privileges.
Bugs may have subtle effects or cause the program to crash or freeze the computer. Bugs can trigger errors that may have ripple effects. A program that contains many bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy (defective). A few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code.
Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made in either a program's design or its source code, or in components and operating systems used by such programs. The process of finding and fixing bugs is termed " debugging" and often uses formal techniques or tools to pinpoint bugs, and since the 1950s, some computer systems have been designed to also deter, detect or auto-correct various computer bugs during operations.