Who wants Fred Shapiro to be a millionaire?

[Fred Shapiro]

On Sat, 25 Mar 2000 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>      That took him up to the $1 million question: "What insect shorted out an
> early supercomputer and inspired the term 'computer bug?'"

If this was the wording of the question, it was indeed remarkably
erroneous.  Not only is the Grace Murray Hopper "bug" derivation --
disproven by me in articles in the Annals of the History of Computing,
Byte, and American Speech -- presented as fact, but the primitive Mark I
computer is described as a supercomputer.


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2