Integrated Goliathus

Artist:      Shoosty®   Year:     2023

Medium: Duplex Printed Ink on 18mm Silk Twill 

Size:      50” x 50” or 36" x 36"

A Nod to the Origin of ‘Bug’ 

Integrated Goliathus is a stunning piece of art and an attempt to change the perception of bugs from bad to good. There are many examples of how bugs are bad in computing, but what you may have failed to understand is that bugs are problems to solve making the world a better place. Bugs force us to solve problems quickly. 

The term ‘bug’ as a problem predates the invention of computers. One of the earliest examples of the term was by Thomas Edison in the 1870s, who joked about finding a ‘bug’ in his apparatus.

The term ‘bug’ became popular in the field of computing after an incident involving Harvard University’s Mark II calculator in 1947. A team of technicians found a moth trapped between points in Relay 70, which caused a malfunction. They removed the moth and taped it in the log book with the caption “First actual case of bug being found.” The logbook is now in the Smithsonian Institution. 

The term ‘bug’ was already in common use among computer programmers before the moth incident, but it helped to popularize it further. The term ‘debugging’ also emerged to describe the process of finding and fixing errors in computer software or hardware. One of the pioneers of debugging was Grace Hopper, a computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral, who worked on the Mark II and other early computers. She often talked about the moth in the relay and used it as an example of debugging.