I don’t get the difference between the “real” meaning of “glitch” the one people use.

The story about the moth in the computer was a joke made by Grace Hopper (a very well-known computer pioneer) about it being the first time a bug was actually found. It wouldn’t have been a joke unless people were already using the word. And it was relays, not vacuum tubes. How could a moth get stuck in a vacuum tube?

“Bug” and “glitch” do not mean the same thing at all. A bug is a generic term for any kind of unwanted behavior. A glitch has a very specific meaning — a very short voltage spike that can cause a fault in a logic circuit. For some reason “glitch” has become fashionable among non-technical people, presumably because it makes them sound more technical. But it really has the opposite effect when the word is used inappropriately.

My favorite is the explanation of the origin of ‘posh’ as the initials on a first-class steamer ticket, which stood for “Port Out Starboard Home”. Again, not a single ticket showing these initials nor any reason for them appearing on a ticket, since absolute cabin assignments are always made before a ship leaves harbor.

My second favorite is that ‘bug’ in the sense of “glitch” was due some professor at MIT (whose first name is known) who discovered an actual moth in the inner workings of a computer at the time computers ran on vacuum tubes. The problem with this one? ‘Bug’ was used in this sense 100 years before the reported incident.

I could have added to my arguments the facts that we have no written record of Smith’s discovery; we don’t even know his first name. There is no way we can prove this story and all the evidence points in another direction.

So, again, no offense was intended. If you wish, I will remove your name from this blog entry.

Secondly, of course the word molecule was known in France at the dates you say but they were mere concepts, Descartes’ a philosophical one like the Greek ‘Atom’ where philosophers conjectured that all things were made up of some small entity. They had no idea what, never proven or discovered. Even after the laws of Dalton and Avagadro in the early nineteenth century, great Physcists like Maxwell and Boltzmann still regarded the concept of the molecule as ‘mere mathematical constructions. It was not until Perrin’s work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the molecule was proven. Remeber the achievement under discussion was the discovery, not the concept.