The Digital Media Strategy Blog

Somewhere around 1964, George Fuechsel is thought to have coined the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” This popular computer science slang expression comes from early programmer education. Fuechsel taught his classes that they must check and recheck their data and coding to ensure that the results they achieved were valid. In this new era of computing, programmers were trained to test each step in their programs and cautioned not to expect that a resulting program would do the right thing even when given imperfect input.