The first computer bug was an actual bug
In 1947 engineers found a moth stuck in a computer and taped it into the logbook. The word “bug” was already older than that.
The log entry for the afternoon of 9 September 1947 at Harvard reads: “Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.” Next to it, still taped to the page, is the moth.
The word “actual” is the giveaway: the joke only works if “bug” already meant a fault. It did. Thomas Edison wrote about “bugs” in his inventions in letters from 1878, and the term was common engineering slang by the early 20th century.
Grace Hopper’s role
Grace Hopper, a pioneering programmer on the Mark computers, loved telling this story, and it became attached to her. She did not find the moth (the team’s engineers did), and she did not coin the word. She made the story famous, and she was a remarkable figure anyway: she was a driving force behind COBOL and the idea that programs could be written in something close to English.
The logbook page is now in the Smithsonian. It may be the only famous software bug you can look at in person.
Bring it up
“There’s a real moth from 1947 in the Smithsonian that’s taped into a computer logbook as the first actual bug.”
Follow the thread
- Leads toThe first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter Another woman in computing, Grace Hopper, gave us one of programming’s most famous stories a century later.
- Same patternWhy do we say “OK”? Like OK, the word spread because a good story attached itself to it.
- RelatedThe man who decided the missiles weren’t real A system error with the highest stakes imaginable, caught by human judgement.
