The Day a Real Bug Broke a Computer
In nineteen forty-seven, engineers found an actual moth stuck inside a giant computer, taped it into their logbook, and helped make the word bug a part of computer language.
Before you read
Before you read
One machine had a real bug inside it. Send this to the coder in your life. In nineteen forty-seven, one of the first big computers in the world suddenly stopped working correctly, and nobody could find the problem.
Engineers searched through the machine's huge wall of switches and wires until they found the cause stuck between two metal contacts: a dead moth. They removed it, taped its body into their logbook, and wrote a short note next to it about finding an actual bug inside the machine.
The word bug already meant a small problem in a machine before that day, but the taped moth became famous anyway, and it is still kept in a museum. Ever since, fixing a computer problem has been called debugging, whether or not any actual insect is involved.
That's the story.
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