CS Manual

First Computer Bug

We 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. 

Grace Murray Hopper (she wrote the first compiler) working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay.

She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stopped (frequently) they told Howard Aiken (another pioneer in the history of computers) that they were “debugging” the computer.

This first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.