The origin of "It's not a bug -- it's a feature."

April 17, 2002 6:11 AM

The origin of "It's not a bug -- it's a feature."
Blame the Intellivision.
posted by NortonDC (15 comments total)

Beware the IE "feature" that makes it ignore anchor tags if you press the alt key before it pops down to the anchor.
posted by NortonDC at 6:14 AM on April 17, 2002

This reminds me of a conversation I had with an Aurora salesman back circa 1989.
The Aurora was a broadcast paint system which was eventually marketed by Chyron. Anyway, I found the images that it created blurry compared to the Quantel Paintbox™, and the salesman said, “What you’re mistaking for blurriness is actually higher resolution.”
posted by jpburns at 6:25 AM on April 17, 2002

I had that game ages ago and that always tripped me up.

The Intellivision rocked, it kicked the Atari's ass (at the time), but around me (North Georgia circa. early80's) there wasn't a lot of games or people who had the system. So that made it less enjoyable. The ads for the system were great. I remember waiting for the speech addition and the keyboard module...
posted by mkelley at 6:27 AM on April 17, 2002

I'm not sure if this is seriously claiming that the expression "It's not a bug, it's a feature" originated at Mattel in 1981, but...it didn't.
posted by rodii at 6:36 AM on April 17, 2002

Rodii -

So, enlighten us, ok?
posted by Irontom at 6:52 AM on April 17, 2002

I think I still have an impression on my thumb from those awful firing buttons and a thirteen hour astrosmash session.

But I am prepared to man the Canadian portion of the missile defense shield!
posted by srboisvert at 8:31 AM on April 17, 2002

There's a Usenet message from July 1981 (the month after Space Hawk started development) mentioning the bug/feature connection, and several more references in the rest of 1981, so I'd suspect the goes back much further.
posted by waxpancake at 8:54 AM on April 17, 2002

It looks like the earliest one actually referring to a known bug as a "feature" (look everyone: irony!) occurs in mid-August, which would leave the Space Hawk incident as the earliest citation.
posted by NortonDC at 9:15 AM on April 17, 2002

I just experienced the most obnoxius pop-up ad ever. When the site loaded, a new IE window popped up, which was just basically the browser window & the scroll bar - no border, no menu, no adress bar, and certainly no [X] to close the window with. Right-clicking on the taskbar was somehow disabled, as was ALT-F4 - some scripting 'feature' that made a modal pop-up dialogue box appear when the ALT key was pressed: "Please use the Close Window feature on the webpage to close this window". Of course, I wasn't going to click on some random button on that webpage, even if it was labelled "Close Window" (even if I wanted to, it was greyed out, and couldn't be pressed anyway). So, the only way to close the window was to CTRL-ALT-DEL (which caused that stupid pop-up dialogue box to appear), and kill the browser. Which killed the half-dozen or so other pages I had open.
posted by skwm at 9:17 AM on April 17, 2002

Sounds like a feature.







Seriously, I don't know where that came from. I get no pop-ups from the main link (using IE). Perhaps you should get AdAware.
posted by NortonDC at 9:24 AM on April 17, 2002

or get another browser
posted by mokey at 9:57 AM on April 17, 2002

I have not gotten any popups from any of the links on this thread. It's Adaware time. (pick a download site)

Let the hijacking continue...
posted by Nauip at 11:16 AM on April 17, 2002

So, enlighten us, ok?

OK! "It's older."

Come on, bug/feature jokes were as common as Snoopy posters when I was in college in the 70s.
posted by rodii at 2:36 PM on April 17, 2002

skwm: ctrl-w (on pc) is a possible option.
but i've got no pop ups here, so i'd second the adaware suggestion.
posted by juv3nal at 2:56 PM on April 17, 2002

Must have been one lameass college.
posted by Settle at 6:30 PM on April 17, 2002