The First Bug Was Real
1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay.
First actual case of bug being found.
Computer literacy books are bursting with bits and bytes and disks and chips and lessons on writing memos using word processing. All this is to provide quick enlightenment for the computer illiterate. But the average newly computer-literate person has not been told about bugs.
It is a bit of a surprise, then, to find that the software you are using does not always work quite right. Or perhaps the programmer who is doing some work for you cannot seem to get the program to work correctly. Both problems are "bugs," errors that were introduced unintentionally into a program when it was written.
The term bug comes from an experience in the early days of computing. One summer day in 1945, according to computer pioneer Grace M. Hopper, the Mark I computer came to a halt. Working to find the problem, computer personnel actually found a moth inside the machine (see photo). They removed the offending bug, and the computer was fine.
From that day forward, any mysterious problem or glitch was said to be a bug.
This description is incorrect:
look at the
evidence here.
H.L Capon, Computers: tools for an information age, 6th edition, p.425, Prentice-Hall, 2000.
When you look at the evidence for previous use of the term "bug" it is clear that Hopper was making a deliberate joke. This was not the first use of the term "bug", but it is the first recorded case where the cause of the engineering bug was an actual insect, which is also known as a bug.