When a Bug Became a Bug

Site: National Museum of American History

My son, the banking systems admin I’m so proud of, sent me this link. Who knew that the bug that popularized the term “bug” for computer programmers was a real moth?!

American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines “bugs” for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were built during the early 1940s, people working on them found bugs in both the hardware of the machines and in the programs that ran them.

In 1947, engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the components. They taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it “first actual case of bug being found.” The words “bug” and “debug” soon became a standard part of the language of computer programmers.