Lord Lucan, Murakami's Strange Library ... and a hitchhiker's guide to the Computing Universe El Reg bookworm Mark Diston trawls through the freshest releases in publishing. This week we have a trippy new Murakami about a murderous librarian, a murder mystery to suit Downton Abbey fans and lastly, a pop-sci romp through computing history that soon takes a turn for the sci-fi... The Strange Library Haruki Murakami has …
... the moth and Monty Python, then this book is for the masses, not the IT wizard. Any Usenet denizen knows that originally spam was a definition of repetitive Usenet postings, unrelated to email, and had its own formula for determination.
I am surprised that a writer for el reg never heard of the skit and what it means...
I still remember the original Siegel and Canter massive spamvertisement usenet butthurt. It's probably up there with dead people at Rolling Stones performances in historical significance.
Please put a stop to this idea that the use of the word 'bug' comes from a problem caused by an insect trapped in the workings of an early computer. It's a nice story, and may even be true, but the use of the word 'bug' in the context of a glitch or problem is far earlier than this. Thomas Edison used the word in its later sense and it was well-established (in the US) during the 19th century. It probably derives from the original meaning of 'bug' (Welsh bwg) as a euphemism for a goblin or the devil (cf 'bugbear') - the use of bug to describe a class of insect is also a derivative of this form, after it became popular the archaic use gradually faded away.
Hear hear -- the urban legend comes from the misinterpretation of an entry in Admiral Grace Hoppers diary where a moth was pinned to the page and labelled "the first real bug".
The moth in question had indeed managed to get itself fried by a relay and caused a long running program to crash. It was labelled a real bug to differentiate from all the previously encountered bugs which did not involve a real insect.
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