Oh please, here we go again. Some young squirt barely dry behind the ears
comes along and thinks his generation has solved it all. The 4004, 8080,
8086, or 6x00 were not even a gleam in the creators eye, let alone the
How *dare* the young whippersnappers intrude with a question! Why before
you know it, they’ll be interrupting us as we sit on the porch in our
rocking chairs sipping mint juleps and talking about our diseases…
Leaving aside for a moment the point that this guy is clearly trying to
get us to do his homework for him… I didn’t see any particular
arrogance in his questions that I can’t reasonably attribute to language
barriers.
Frankly, I think Babbage is probably not going far enough. Al-Khwarizmi
himself probably had to single step through his algorithms in order to
find errors… of course, that’s not on a machine distinct from the
human brain, but speaking of arrogance :-)…
Getting back to reality, though, I’m sure every computer ever built has
had *some* mechanism to debug code. I’m a relatively young
whippersnapper myself, but the earliest computer I’ve ever programmed
could single step and trap, though you had to do it pretty manually (an
Imsai 8080, in case anyone cares… so I can only personally testify
that the capability goes back to 1975).
Nonetheless, certainly you could single step all the way back in the
first punchcard tabulator days (by, err, feeding in punchcards one at a
time :-). Whether you could call those “computers” or not depends on
your religion. I’m not sure about ENIAC, though. It was programmed by
rewiring and was a comparatively asynchronous and parallel machine…
Lest we forget, the word “debugging” itself was first applied to
computers in response to removing an insect, not stepping through code
(Edison supposedly coined the term, though I’m not sure how much of that
is the usual Edison hagiography). One could reasonably argue that
“debugging computers” wasn’t possible until the term was first applied
to computers, which would put us in the mid-to-late 40s.
…/ray..
Please remove “.spamblock” from my email address if you need to contact
me outside the newsgroup.
Don’t forget the IBM ANFSQ7 computers that were built in the 1950’s. They
were the nation’s air defense system until the airborne AWACS took over.
Those computers were made with tubes and the first maintenance step was to
turn off the lights and find the tube that was not lit up. They were hernia
creating tubes not the little ones from the 1960’s TV sets. The consoles
were twelve feet long and had hundreds of lights. I saw one on some old
movie, but I don’t remember much about it. The tape drives, 7 channel, used
the middle bit for parity and not the end as became customary later.
“Tim Roberts” wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg… > Gary G. Little wrote: > >>Oh please, here we go again. Some young squirt barely dry behind the ears >>comes along and thinks his generation has solved it all. The 4004, 8080, >>8086, or 6x00 were not even a gleam in the creators eye, let alone the >>creator being a gleam in their father’s eye, when the first program was >>single stepped through a computer. >> >>Remember all those flashing lights you see on the main consoles of >>computers in documentaries or movies from the 50’s and 60’s? Below most of >>those lights were switches used to turn the corresponding bit on or off. >>Using other control switches you could set memory locations, change >>registers or halt the machine and completely re-write the machine code. >> > > Absolutely right. The Control Data 3000 mainframes, circa 1960, had some > very cool single-step and breakpoint facilities on that flashy front > console. The IBM/360 front panel was also very useful for low-level > debugging. > > – > Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com > Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. > >
Lest we forget, the word “debugging” itself was first applied to
computers in response to removing an insect, not stepping through code
(Edison supposedly coined the term, though I’m not sure how much of that
is the usual Edison hagiography). One could reasonably argue that
It was supposedly Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (credited with the
first compiler ever written) who coined the term “debugging”
1945 AD - John von Neumann describes the concept of “stored program”.
Grace Murray Hooper pulls a dead bug from a broken computer relay on the
Mark II computer at Harvard University. She later glued the bug into a
logbook of the computer. Continual cleaning of the relays is referred to
as “debugging” the computer. The very first bug is still kept in the
National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.
“udas2980” wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg… > >> >> Lest we forget, the word “debugging” itself was first applied to >> computers in response to removing an insect, not stepping through code >> (Edison supposedly coined the term, though I’m not sure how much of that >> is the usual Edison hagiography). One could reasonably argue that > > It was supposedly Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (credited with the > first compiler ever written) who coined the term “debugging” > > For example the following is from > http://nuhsd.k12.ca.us/brhs/faculty/Stephan/history/Timeline.html > > 1945 AD - John von Neumann describes the concept of “stored program”. > Grace Murray Hooper pulls a dead bug from a broken computer relay on the > Mark II computer at Harvard University. She later glued the bug into a > logbook of the computer. Continual cleaning of the relays is referred to > as “debugging” the computer. The very first bug is still kept in the > National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. >
Thanks to all answers. It sounds there is not a simple answer to such
questions for it took a long evolution process to current stage. Now
what I can do is to find the historical papers to know who had published
the idea earlier.
FWIW, I meant that the term “bug”, meaning a flaw in a mechanism, is
attributed to Edison. Applying the term to computers is attributed to
Hopper, under the circumstances you describe.
udas2980 wrote:
>
> Lest we forget, the word “debugging” itself was first applied to
> computers in response to removing an insect, not stepping through code
> (Edison supposedly coined the term, though I’m not sure how much of
> that is the usual Edison hagiography). One could reasonably argue that
It was supposedly Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (credited with the
first compiler ever written) who coined the term “debugging”
1945 AD - John von Neumann describes the concept of “stored program”.
Grace Murray Hooper pulls a dead bug from a broken computer relay on the
Mark II computer at Harvard University. She later glued the bug into a
logbook of the computer. Continual cleaning of the relays is referred to
as “debugging” the computer. The very first bug is still kept in the
National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.
–
…/ray..
Please remove “.spamblock” from my email address if you need to contact
me outside the newsgroup.
In fact it appears the term “bug” as a flaw in a mechanism was already in
estbalished use at the time of Edison. Now to quote Shakespeare Henry VI
Part III Acvt V Scene II King Edward “So, lie thou there. Die thou; and die
our fear, for Warwick was a bug that fear’d us all.” One can go back as to
the first edition of Johnson’s dictionary to find at the time “bug” meaning
“a frightful object; a walking spectre”. This seems to come from from the
(obsolete) Welsh word “bwg” which at the time meant a ghost or hobgoblin and
also seems the to have been the root of words such as bogle, bogeyman.
Iechyd da!
“udas2980” wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg… > >> >> Lest we forget, the word “debugging” itself was first applied to >> computers in response to removing an insect, not stepping through code >> (Edison supposedly coined the term, though I’m not sure how much of that >> is the usual Edison hagiography). One could reasonably argue that > > It was supposedly Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (credited with the > first compiler ever written) who coined the term “debugging” > > For example the following is from > http://nuhsd.k12.ca.us/brhs/faculty/Stephan/history/Timeline.html > > 1945 AD - John von Neumann describes the concept of “stored program”. > Grace Murray Hooper pulls a dead bug from a broken computer relay on the > Mark II computer at Harvard University. She later glued the bug into a > logbook of the computer. Continual cleaning of the relays is referred to > as “debugging” the computer. The very first bug is still kept in the > National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. >