The Origin of the Name DEBUG - China DOS Union Forum - China DOS Union

In English, BUG means an insect, and here it refers to errors in a program, so DEBUG means removing errors from a program. But how could there be insects in a program? Actually, there is a story behind this. In 1941, a man named Conrad Zuse built the Z3 relay computer, which was made up of a great many relays. When a relay's small switch was closed, it meant "1"; when open, it meant "0". One day he wrote a program using "0" and "1" and ran it on that computer, but it failed to run properly. He checked the program again and again, but still could not find the error. So he had no choice but to inspect that huge machine's relays one by one. In the end, he found that a bug had died under the switch of one relay, preventing it from making contact.... Later, people started calling the removal of program errors DEBUG.

Floor1　Lydong	Posted 2003-06-07 00:00
元老会员　Posts 407　Credits 1,468　From 广州
In English, BUG means an insect, and here it refers to errors in a program, so DEBUG means removing errors from a program. But how could there be insects in a program? Actually, there is a story behind this. In 1941, a man named Conrad Zuse built the Z3 relay computer, which was made up of a great many relays. When a relay's small switch was closed, it meant "1"; when open, it meant "0". One day he wrote a program using "0" and "1" and ran it on that computer, but it failed to run properly. He checked the program again and again, but still could not find the error. So he had no choice but to inspect that huge machine's relays one by one. In the end, he found that a bug had died under the switch of one relay, preventing it from making contact.... Later, people started calling the removal of program errors DEBUG.

Floor2　沈洁	Posted 2003-06-07 00:00
金牌会员　Posts 1,812　Credits 4,590　From 上海市
Conrad Zuse was a woman! She later became a famous American computer scientist! She even received lots of medals!

Floor3　Dark-Destroy	Posted 2003-06-07 00:00
元老会员　Posts 3,551　Credits 8,312
Hehe, so that's how it was originally~~

Floor4　pc1415926	Posted 2003-06-10 00:00
初级用户　Posts 24　Credits 167
Oh, so that's what happened!!