Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. biff – named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on 15 August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to a certain Heidi Stettner.B – probably a contraction of ' BCPL', reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7.
The first case of an actual computer bug, a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II
