It is a story often told on the Internet that the first computer “bug” was a real “bug”, that is, a bug. It is even said that this insect is a fully squashed moth. Like many stories that have become modern legends, we can say that this story is based on fact, but in some retellings of the story, the details may be a bit muddled.
The story goes like this, according to scientist Fred R. Shapiro: On September 9, 1945 (some sources say 1947), Harvard engineers worked on the Mark II, also known as the Aiken Relay Calculator, an electromechanical computer being tested for the US Navy. they were working. One of the brilliant people working on this project was Grace Hopper, a groundbreaking computer pioneer and mathematician named after a battleship with extremely rare honors in the US Navy.
The team of computer scientists noticed that the Mark II was acting strangely. After examining the hardware, they found that the malfunction was caused by an unfortunate moth stuck between relay 70 of panel F.
The dead moth was removed from there, and Cooper placed the specimen on the day’s log sheet, together with adhesive tape and the note “First true case of ‘bug’ found”.
This log was rediscovered at the Naval Warfare Center Computer Museum in Virginia in 1988, and the moth was still taped to the paper.
This part of the story seems real. At least, there’s no reason to assume it was made up. However, some interpretations of the story go a step further and suggest that the term “computer bug” is directly derived from this event.
Unfortunately, this claim is absolutely untrue.
The term “bug” was first used in a letter from Thomas Edison to inventor Theodore Puskas in 1878. “Bugs—minor bugs and the way problems are named—show up, and months of intense monitoring, study, and effort are required before commercial success or failure is definitively achieved,” his letter states.
Similarly, Shapiro writes that the Addendum to the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “bug” as “a defect or error in a machine, plan, or the like.” The dictionary definition quotes a newspaper article from 1889, also in which Edison is cited. Thus, it appears that the word “bug” was used half a century before the event of the Mark II computer to describe an unexpected problem, particularly with regard to machinery or electronics.
It is also impossible to say whether this anecdote can be considered the first computer error. Admittedly, in the 1940s computers were still in their very early days, but it’s impossible to say whether this glitch was the first time a computer bug was called a “bug”…
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