bug (the first computer bug)
loreprogrammingops culture
The 1947 logbook entry in which a moth trapped in a Harvard Mark II relay was taped down beside the note "First actual case of bug being found."
It is real and it is delightful, but it is not the origin of the word: engineers, Edison among them, were calling defects "bugs" decades earlier. The 1947 moth is the first case of a literal bug causing a fault, and the logbook survives in the Smithsonian. Grace Hopper loved to tell the story, which is how the two ideas got fused in popular memory.
Disputed / commonly mistold A popular version of this story is inaccurate - see the note above.
Also known as: first bug, computer moth, debugging origin
Sources
- National Museum of American History - the 1947 logbook
- Hopper / Harvard Mark II operations log, 1947-09-09