September 9, 1947 –
At the Naval Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, Grace Murray Hopper records the discovery of the first actual computer “bug” by the computer’s operators at 3:45pm in her log book with the explanation, “First instance of actual computer bug being found.” The bug is literally just that, a moth which had become stuck in Relay #70 on Panel “F” of the Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. When they extracted the culprit with tweezers, they taped it into the logbook along with the official report.
Legend has it that Hopper, a naval officer and famous mathematician, was the one who found the bug, but she will state categorically that she wasn’t there at the time. The urban legend will crop up that this was the first-ever use of the word ‘bug’ in this context, but that’s not true. Thomas Edison used the term bug when discussing electrical circuits as early as the 1870s. It is, however, the first time the term “debug” is used. The log book will later be preserved by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
