The World’s First Computer Bug

Written on 20th November 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

This morning my iPhone crashed. Must have been a bug. But what is a ‘Bug’ really? Why do we call programming errors ‘Bugs’?

Apparently we call them bugs because Grace Hopper found the first computer “bug”: a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II on September 9, 1945. These early computers were attracting lost of moths who got stuck between the light-bulbs inside the machines. At times there were so many relays malfunctioning that they had a full time bulb changer working to fix find all the ‘Bugs’ stuck between relays.

Hopper created the first compiler for a computer programming language and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes.

Grace pasted the actual bug in her log, as you can see above, as the “first actual case of bug being found.” The term “bug” had meant a computer error beforehand but it became a popular term after Grace found an actual bug.

Besides being credited with finding he first real computer bug Grace is also known as the first person to say the now famous line:

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.“

Found in a post titled “The Wonderful World of Early Computing” over at Neatorama.

bug, cobol, first actual case of bug being found, grace hopper, Harvard Mark II, UNIVAC

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