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There are quite a few stories on how the term fuzzing came to be.. fuzzy logic? Testing electrical lines? Not quite.

I spoke with Prof. Barton Miller a while back and just got to review what was said in our conversation for something I am writing, I figured I will share:

"In the Fall of 1989, I was on a dial-up modem to my campus computer. There was a big, midwest thunderstorm that was causing noise on the phone line (this was before error-correction modems), so it was a race to type a command before a stream of nonsense characters would interfere. I was surprised that these seemingly random characters would occasionally cause Unix utilities to crash. So, as one of my suggested projects in my graduate OS class (CS736), I assigned a project of writing a random character generator and testing as many Unix utility programs as possible. I called this random stream "fuzz", named after the noise on the phone line.

It had nothing to do with fuzzy logic nor any other field. And I'm not sure why I picked the particular word fuzz."

Gadi.