So, the story goes something like this. In 1947, in Virginia, US, an error was spotted on the Harvard Mark II, one of the first programmable computers in the world. A team went to investigate, discovering that a moth had been caught between a relay in a machine. It was subsequently removed and taped to a logbook, with the following message accompanying it: “First actual case of bug being found.”
US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who worked on this machine, was so fond of this story that she would often recount it to friends, colleagues and acquaintances, so much so that over the years she became inextricably linked to the idea of computer bugs, debugging and bugs in the machine. And so, in addition to being one the foremost pioneers of the computer age, she’s also coined one (or some) of the most well-known phrases.
Grace Hopper: Computer bugs & the language of programming
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