Computer science brought several ways of interpreting words that already existed, including the meaning of the word bug . 20 years ago, expressions such as backup, data base, download, login, link, online, UBS, wireless, upload, among others, were not even known or were part of our daily lives.
But everything changed. The Brazilian language, as well as several languages around the world, absorbed dozens of American words to name objects and actions related to the world of computing, as a bug. Do you want to know its meaning? Continue reading.
What does the word bug mean?
The literal translation of the English word into Portuguese means animal . That’s right! Bug is related to pets, bedbugs or a beetle. Although initially it is strange, the word is widely used today.
What happens is that not every translation can be done literally. The word bug when used in computing cannot be understood as it really is in everyday life. Bug was chosen in computing to say something more. Which you will discover in the next topic.
Meaning of the word bugado
If bug means, in the literal translation, bug, bug is something like bug . Have you heard anyone speak like that? “This ceiling is cracked”. That is, full of termites and no longer serves anything.
Well, this expression is used a lot when computers are with some error or damage . In this way, experts call it a computer bug.
Bug literally means animal (Photo: depositphotos)
Although, the machine is not really bugged, but it is like a kind of damage that needs to be fixed. Thus, the expression buggy, is nothing but buggy, bad, with problems. The system is buggy or buggy, it means it is buggy, buggy, defective .
The most interesting of all is that the language is a living organism, which renews itself, absorbs and leaves behind a few words. Therefore, the word bug with meaning in Portuguese was soon adopted by the colloquial norm and many people already use it outside the computer universe.
For example, if someone is confused, making some mistakes, they say: “she is buggy”. The same expression is used for other electronic equipment such as cell phones or home appliances, “the washing machine has a bug”, for example.
That is, the word bug although in the literal translation it means animal, nowadays it is used to refer to the error on the computer or adapted to everyday situations in which people want to say that things are not correct, they are “buggy” .
See also: The evolution of computers
What is the millennium bug
This expression, bug, surfaced in the late 90’s. It was on the covers of specialized and business magazines, occupied the newspapers and was featured on television stories, because it was related to another problem much bigger than one. small error on an individual computer.
The millennium bug was nothing more than a collective error in all computer systems in the world . This should happen at the turn of 1999 to the year 2000.
For you to understand what the millennium bug was, you need to understand how computer systems work at the time of the creation of the first machines.
In the 1960s, when computers began to gain fame and began to be produced on a larger scale, some hardware and software standards were adopted .
A large part of the systems used the Cobol language, which changed only the last two digits each year. The first two to save memory, were repeated as 19 . In other words, at the turn of 1991 to 1992, the computer only needed to change the last two numbers: 91 to 92. The front 19 was just repeated, static.
This was designed because of the huge need to save space and memory on machines that were minimal.
Thus, the buzz started about the possible errors that databases, banks, institutions, companies or any other media would suffer at the turn of the year 1999 to 2000.
Simply, the system would jump from 99 to 00, as was already predicted, however 19 would remain static , that is, computers would read the date as 1900.
In practice, this would give a bug on older systems. If you start with the complexity of the fact, you would have a lot of confusion with files and processes already in progress, because from one moment to the next, the date would automatically go back: bills would be 100 years late, interest on interest and countless damages assets would be created.
Catastrophic predictions of the bug
Experts feared that a series of errors could compromise systems around the world. Of course, most of the systems had already been updated, so this fear of the millennium bug was made mainly by people who did not understand the subject .
