The First Computer Bug

In 1947, the first computers were making their rounds through large corporations, universities, and government institutes. Grace Murray Hopper was working on one of these early systems at Harvard University, a Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. On the 9th of September of 1947, the machine began to exhibit problems and the engineers investigated. What they found was surprising but not entirely unexpected when computers were large machines taking up entire rooms. A simple household moth had become trapped between the points of Relay #70 in Panel F of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. The moth was preventing the relay from functioning as expected, and the machine was quite literally debugged. The engineers knew they had a piece ...

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