[GNC] GnuCash 5.9 on macOS 15.2 Dev Beta

[Michael or Penny Novack]

>> PS -- know why we call them "bugs"? << the origin of the tern >>
> The story i was told many years ago was a dead moth shorting out some core
> memory module (or somesuch) in the very early days of stored programming.

Well ...... sort of yes, but how the term came about makes a whole lot 
more sense when you heard it from one of the people who were there. In 
my case, from the late , Adm. Grace Murray Hopper << where I used to 
work had her come and address all us IT folks >>

Those were the days of WWII and these early machines were being used for 
code cracking.

See, they were required to fill out lengthy reports explaining each 
outage. Which naturally got these bright young things POed, as hardware 
outages were very frequent and they felt that a waste of their time, 
busy as they were busy trying to crack cyphers. Well one day the outage 
was caused by this insect causing a short. They decided, they want us to 
waste our time writing lengthy reports explaining EXACTLY why, then they 
can waste their time reading EXACTLY why. They sent the offending insect 
over to the Smithsonian asking for ALL the information available on the 
specimen and when the Smithsonian sent them back the information << 
scientific name, description, what it ate, what ate it, life cycle, etc. 
 >> they included all of that in their report.

The next time they submitted an outage report, the response was "OK, 
what kind of a bug was it this time?". And the name stuck.

She also used to hand out "nanoseconds" --- lengths of copper wire which 
represented the distance electrons could go (in wire) in a nanosecond. 
To drive home that the physical sizes of machines imposed limits on how 
fast they could be.

Michael D Novack