一只真虫子弄坏电脑的那天

有一台机器里真的进了一只虫子。把这个故事分享给你身边写代码的人。一千九百四十七年，世界上最早的一批大型计算机之一突然出了故障，没有人能找出问题所在。

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.

工程师们在这台机器巨大的开关和电线墙里反复搜寻，最终发现问题出在两个金属触点之间卡着的东西：一只死蛾子。他们把它取出来，用胶带贴进了工作日志，还在旁边写了一句简短的说明，记录他们在机器里发现了一只真正的“虫子”。

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.

其实在那之前，“虫子”这个词就已经被用来指机器里的小故障了，但那只贴在日志里的蛾子还是出了名，至今仍保存在一座博物馆里。从那以后，修理电脑故障就被称为“除虫”，不论问题里是否真的涉及一只昆虫。

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.