Not a flaw, it's a feature!
By the way, this phrase comes from an early Microsoft press release, where someone had complained about a bug in an early version of Windows. Microsoft replied "That's not a flaw, it's a feature." It has become a catchphrase in the industry.
Actually, Sharon, the first use seems to be from Usenet in '84. From Wikipedia (THE most accurate journal in the world :wink
:
In other cases,
software bugs are referred to jokingly as undocumented features. ("
It's not a bug; it's an undocumented feature!")
[2] This usage may have been popularised in some of Microsoft's responses to bug reports for its first
Word for Windows product,
[3] but doesn't originate there. The oldest surviving reference on Usenet (
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!original/net.bugs.uucp/8-6IxzIxeZQ/2oKU6_gX9kwJ) dates to 5 March 1984.
[4] Between 1969 and 1972, Sandy Mathes, a systems programmer for
PDP-8 software at
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Maynard, MA, used the terms "bug" and "feature" in her reporting of test results to distinguish between undocumented actions of delivered software products that were
unacceptable and
tolerable, respectively. This usage may have been perpetuated.
[5]