Moth in the machine: Debugging the origins of ‘bug’

It's an oft-repeated tale that the grand dame of military computing, computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, coined the terms bug and debug after an incident involving Harvard University's Mark II calculator.

The story goes like this:

On September 9, 1945, a Harvard technical team looked at Panel F and found something unusual between points in Relay 70. It was a moth, which they promptly removed and taped in the log book. Grace Hopper added the caption "First actual case of bug being found," and that's the first time anyone used the word bug to describe a computer glitch. Naturally, the term debugging followed.

Yes, it's an oft-repeated tale, but it's got more bugs in it than Relay 70 probably ever had. Read more...