Come on admit it......

shifty_uk said:
Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever even seen a cockroach in the UK before *puke emoji*
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It's not really a thing per say over here.

The UK does have indigenous cockroaches however they are distinctly different to the ones you see infesting houses in American television shows. The UK species only grow to be a centimetre long, they are found outdoors and not classified as pest insects.

So the reason you don't hear about it as much as in America is the same reason you don't here people here talking about our spiders and snakes in the same way Australians do about theirs.

Assuming this isn't just a publicity stunt it would be really interesting to find out how exactly cockroaches found their way into a PC. Best guess I can think off is that the owner keeps reptiles and some live food escaped :S
 
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punky_munky said:
Computer bugs are named after literal moths getting stuck in the electronics in the 1940s hence the term debugging.

Are moths bugs though?
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That's a common misunderstanding due to inaccurate reporting of tech in the mainstream media back in the day.

The earliest surviving reference to unexpected errors in an electrical device being called bugs dates back to ~1900 (in a magazine), but it's used without explanation because it was a commonly (by people interested in tech) used term by then. It probably goes back to the early years of the electrical telegraph system in the mid 19th century.

The misunderstanding probably arose because (like today) the mainstream media frequently made a bad job of reporting on tech stories.

What happened was this:

An early computer was returning inaccurate results for a program. The people at the site dry ran the code and got the right results, fed it to the computer and got wrong results. So a hardware problem was a good possibility. Early computers were a bit limited on reliability. The computer used thousands of vacuum tubes and loads of cabling connecting them. It was large enough to walk around inside the computer, partly because it had to be for the tubes and cooling and partly because it was necessary for techs to be able to walk around inside the computer to replace failed tubes. So the techs painstakingly went through everything to determine exactly where the error occurred and what parts of the computer were being used at that exact time, to narrow down where inside the computer the problem was. They walked around inside the relevant part of the computer...and found the body of a moth that had flown in and touched a live contact that killed it. The body of the moth was affecting the resistance of that part of the circuit and causing the incorrect results.

They removed the body of the moth, taped it into the site's logbook and wrote a jokey comment about this being the first case of a bug being caused by a bug.

A bit later, Grace Hopper (who wasn't there at the time and wasn't involved) recounted the story as an amusing anecdote about computers. She was famous, which drew some attention to the incident. Reporters put 2 and 2 together to reach the usual answer of "I don't care what's true and I don't have time to find out anyway" and reported it as Grace Hopper discovering the moth and creating the term "bug" to describe an unexpected error in a computer. She never claimed that and publicly stated several times that the reporting was wrong, but to little effect.

The logbook's in a museum now. There's probably an image online...


...yes, here it is:

www.si.edu

Log Book With Computer Bug | Smithsonian Institution

www.si.edu www.si.edu
 
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That's fascinating, thanks for sharing. I've always taken the moth thing as truth as that's what we were taught at university.

I had no idea that the term bug was used to describe an engineering fault many decades before the dawn of computers.
 
ubersonic said:
The UK does have indigenous cockroaches however they are distinctly different to the ones you see infesting houses in American television shows. The UK species only grow to be a centimetre long, they are found outdoors and not classified as pest insects.
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Unfortunately that's not entirely true. We get German cockroaches (species) and they do infest homes as a pest, especially when they're messy and unsanitary. I grew up in a council block, if your neighbours are gross and get pests, then you do too :(

Commonly had adult cockroaches 20mm long in my kitchen in the 90s. Females a bit longer with the egg case on their tail.
 
We lived in a large terraced housing area (old pit houses) when I was younger and these were commonplace. Any dark rooms and hiding areas like, under the stairs, food cupboards or a coal house attached to your home where it wasn't too cold, were chock full of the little devils :D these days I don't see them around, except maybe some of the allotments where there's a little food for them to get to.

There used to be thousands around when I was growing up though. I'm surprised so many people are so shocked by them.
 
Paying for an exterminator to come in for a couple of roaches. Not even big ones. What a bunch of melts.

Also who is to say it was the returnee that had the roaches inside. These things go through a vast myriad of distribution centers which are filthy rodent infested places at the best of times!

You get dead mice and rats in the back of trailers all the time.
 
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ubersonic said:
Assuming this isn't just a publicity stunt it would be really interesting to find out how exactly cockroaches found their way into a PC. Best guess I can think off is that the owner keeps reptiles and some live food escaped :S
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It probably is that tbh.. just a funny tweet posted for a bit of a laugh on a Friday.
 
adam cool dude said:
Paying for an exterminator to come in for a couple of roaches. Not even big ones. What a bunch of melts.

Also who is to say it was the returnee that had the roaches inside. These things go through a vast myriad of distribution centers which are filthy rodent infested places at the best of times!

You get dead mice and rats in the back of trailers all the time.
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A couple of cockroaches that were shown in the pictures..

It doesn't take many of any prolific pests to get in to cause a massive, and hard to deal with problem if you don't take prompt action, especially anything that lays eggs as by the time you see the adult there is a good chance eggs have already been left somewhere.

Also the fact that there was one squished at the lower/side of the foam packaging is a fairly good indicator it was there when the case was packaged for shipping, those foam forms are usually extremely tight in the box in my experience.
 
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