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May 24th, 2006
The First Computer Bug
Ever wondered about the origins of the term “bugs” as applied to computer technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation.
The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school administrators that the first computer “bug” was a real bug — a moth.
At Harvard one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the “granddaddy” of modern computers, the Mark I. “Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer,” she said. “Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two inch moth.
The first official record of the use of the word “bug” in the context of computing is associated with a relay-based Harvard Mark II computer, which was in service at the Naval Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. On September 9th, 1945, a moth flew into one of the relays and jammed it. The offending moth was taped into the log book alongside the official report, which stated: “First actual case of a bug being found.”
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, “I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question.”
The term “bug” is now universally accepted by computer users as meaning an error or flaw — either in the machine itself or, perhaps more commonly, in a program (hence the phrase “debugging a program”).
Via: Waterholes.com and Maxmon.com
