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Anniversary of the First Computer Bug
aheath writes "According to the
US Naval Historical Center the first computer bug was logged on September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug. What is your favorite computer bug story?"
September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F [..] "
September 10, 1945 at 08:02: "Darl McBride Sr. claims he owns the moth."
September 10, 1945 at 23:53: "We snuck into Darl's room and put his hand in a bucket of warm water."
September 11, 1945 at 09:46: "Darl gets to work late but is proud to show us 'his' new bucket. We all hate him."
Trolling is a art,
Those things really multiply don't they?
First you find ONE in a computer relay. Then, almost sixty years later, they've multiplied so that there's one in every program I write.
Like cockroaches.
You just can't get rid of them. They're hard to find. And when you squash one, three more come from nowhere!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator
:-)
Cool. I always wondered about the etymology of "computer bug", and now I know the etymology is truly related to entymology.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Win98 crashing on Bill Gates in front of millions of viewers.
Will code a sig generator for food
You read to many Encylopedia Brown books.
"Corporal James Smith, Third Mounted Infantry, World War One." You'd know that even if the sword was real, the inscription was years after WWII, making it less valuable, and lessening it's voracity
It hungered for recognition no less.
My favorite bug was in an existing product that had been on the shelves for a while and went through numerous patches to fix many bugs. Going through the testing, I found the UI could not be moved around the screen with a left handed mouse configuration! Immediately, I dropped the bong and decided a cup of coffee and looking on a few other machines were in order. Did those and the bug was legit. Sent it to development and they scrubbed it "as designed". Silly bug, but I can't believe no one tested or complained about it.
...was that an update to Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a small screen over the air intake) was developed on 1 September 1945, but the navy was too slow in installing the patch.
It's a new and exciting feature!
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
way back, my first job... only 2 programmers, me and another guy who worked from home over a 9600baud modem. We had no CVS or anything like it(we were noob).
The "bug" in question was merely him and me modifying the same file every other day. I used i,j,k,z for iterator variables. He had the habit of using i,j,k,m. The file had 2 functions, one with a parameter z, the other with a parameter m.
I guess you can figure out how horrible such things can get. It took weeks before we figured out it was a naming issue.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Windows ME
Could we please stop hearing about it?
Doing some tech work in Brooklyn, NY. I got a call from a small company (3 machines in a business run out of a apartment).
Well one of the machines was making funny sounds. I heard the machine when I arived and it sounded like a wire was caught in the fan. I opened the case and about 10 very large and nasty roaches ran out, there were about 20 dead ones inside the case.
It seems the 80mm fan in the back got pushed in an left a nice hole in the case, which the 2 childern in the house used to put food they didn't want to eat.
I refused to clean the machine out, and told them what they had to do, I got outta their as soon as I could, trying not to vomit thinking about the roach guts on the CPU fan.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
I don't know if this counts, but here goes:
I worked as student help at a college that had a PDP-11 based mainframe. One night it went down. Computer techs were called out but could find nothing wrong. This continued night after night at about the same time each night. So the techs hung around after hours to keep an eye on it.
Around 6:30pm, the cleaning woman came in with her vaccuum cleaner. She promptly went over to the wall socket, unplugged the mainframe, plugged in her vaccuum cleaner and started vaccuuming the floor.
IAALS.
Seen on the license plate of a VW Beetle: FEATURE
Arbitrary sig
While working on an embedded printer driver board, I had just burned new firmware and installed it, tested it, and, because we had had an incident where the internals of another printer had melted together, left it off and unplugged. Five minutes later one of the applications programmers came storming into my office claiming that my new firmware was crap. I calmly walked back out to the lab, looked over the machine, and commented "it works better if you plug it in..."
Antz is my favorite Computer Bug Story
they didn't find a rabbit in there. Then we'd all be referring to "derabbiting" or "derabbitizing" the program.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
They taped the moth to the page? Were they saving it in case they had to stick it back in there sometime?
Okay, back in the day(tm), I worked in technical support at Spry, makers of Internet in a Box(tm). One of my duties was to write up bug reports for the internal support system for the tech support reps.
:)
Turns out we had a bug in Spry Mosaic that, when it hit an empty IMG tag (as in, nothing else in the tag but the letters IMG), it would instantly crash. When I wrote up the document, I forgot to escape the less-than and greater-than marks, so it put the actual tag in the tech support document.
The upshot - when the tech support reps searched the database for 'crash in browser', one of the hits that would come up was the document I made - when they loaded it to see the details on 'crash in browser', that's exactly what they got. Ooops.
I can laugh about it now.
Actually, I laughed about it then, too.
A Heisenbug is a bug that goes away when you look for it and reappears when you stop looking.
When I worked as a technicion for UPS I was often called upon to visit customers at their businesses or homes. I visited this guy near Pt. Charlotte, FL (and that's another horror story in itself) who had a PC damaged during shipping. I should have known before I entered his house that it would be BAD -- there were shopping carts, old engines, tree branches all around his property. When I finally navigated through his living room into his (horrors) bedroom where the PC sat, I was already getting nauseous.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked, since there didn't seem to be any damage.
"It won't turn on," said he.
OK, no problem. As a technician we were allowed to pop open the PC to check if it was simply a cable or card that came loose during shipping. No problem. I pulled out my screwdriver and started undoing the case. Soon as popped the top a bunch of massive roaches scampered out.... followed by dozens of little miniature ones. Now, I HATE ROACHES. I can play with grasshoppers, earthworms, beetles, and other critters but roaches just give me the willies. The guy just looked at them marching around as if they were some little pets. With supreme effort I put everything back together and turned on the PC. It booted! The only sickenging thing was this flick-flick noise coming from the fan. I think there's a roach still lodged in the fan to this day, its little antennae wiggling, its nasty little legs twitching back and forth. flick-flick-flick...
(true story)
They probably saved the moth just in case removing the moth made the entire system break... they might have needed to back out the moth removal change.
I know some software people who work this way.
On a different note, I wonder if ther are any operators who still keep logs.
However, it suddenly stopped working and it had turned out that during an upgrade the number had been changed slightly. The leading 9 (to dial for an outside line) had been removed. Therefore rather than hitting an outside line, it would dial 0 (getting the receptionist) and then try to negotiate with her before hanging up. Three minutes later, it would try again and again - until it had retried and failed 10 times.
The poor receptionist hadn't reported it to anyone and it was only after about a week did they find the problem. She'd put up with 10 calls a day for 5 days without saying a word. She thought it was some prank caller.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Couldn't resist the "favorite computer bug" temptation...
In college, around 1982, a friend had a micro by a company called Ohio Scientific, a Challenger something-or-other (I think that's right). The machine was running a BASIC interpreter, and had a character set that supported some simple games. Among the special characters supported were "tanks" in various orientations, so one could write a simple tank hunting game. Which he did.
We noticed when we started playing that we could move the tank offscreen and back, since he hadn't put any bounds checking to constrain the tank movement. When we toured too far offscreen, however, the program crashed.
We typed LIST to have a look at where bounds checking might be added to the code, and we found the runaway tank. Leaving a swath of blank spaces behind it, there was the tank character embedded in a line of BASIC source code...
The early F18s had a bug in the flight control software.
It was really a safety feature, where if the pilot suddenly jerked the stick down, it would compensate and only climb so slowly, as to prevent an accidental knock of the stick exposing the pilot to a zillion G's and knocking him out.
Some F18s flying towards a mountain, the pilots pulled up, the software said "nuh uh" and they smacked right into the side of it.
Or so goes the story I heard so long ago (which was told to me by a Canadian F18 pilot who visited my school on career day, needlessly he was infinitely more popular than the accountant but not as popular as the animator who worked on Ewoks, Droids and Inspector Gadget)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Apollos were well networked, and it was possible to manipulate the parameters of the windowing system on one machine from another machine (like you can with X Window system, given sufficient permissions).
The Apollos had a command to change the mouse speed (similar to the X "xset m" command). It took a numeric value specifying the pointer distance to travel per unit time. The bug was that if you specified a negative value, the mouse pointer would travel backwards. No big surprise really, and not very interesting.
When this bug was discovered but not yet fixed or widely known, someone decided to play a practical joke, and walked into a fellow hacker's office and sat at his workstation and started playing with his mouse. A few seconds later (with the help of a hidden assistant in another office), the hacker says, hey look, there's something wrong with your mouse, it's all backwards. Sure enough, the mouse is acting all upside-down. The prankster then says, hey, I know what's wrong, have you cleaned your mouse lately? You must have put your mouse ball in upside down. He then pops the mouse ball out and pops it back into the mouse, and sure enough (with hidden assistance), the mouse works normally again. The victim of the practical joke was, of course, entirely puzzled.
I wonder if they submitted a change control for approval first. If so, they probably needed to keep the bug incase of an audit later.
Tracking #: 121144608
Title: Bush robot constantly makes grammatic mistakes and makes up words.
Problem Detail:
Corporate puppet robot model George W. Bush (serial #44625441) exhibits erratic grammatical behavior when deviating from scripted speeches. Often uses words like "subliminable", "methodological", "mispronunciated", "stregic", and "permanency" in place of their English equivalents. Platinum users (Haliburton, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, Bechtel, Kenneth Lay) have noticed other erratic grammatical behavior, including such phrases as "is our children learning", "we need to make the pie higher", and "will the highways on the internet become more few". Strongly suspect some Jim Beam spilled into the model's grammar logic circuits during an all-night instructional binge session with Barbara and Jenna. Suggest immediate implementation of gaffe-filtering algorithm on all corporate media modules to limit the damage from this bug.
Problem Resolution:
Media filters in place as of 12 SEP 2001. Language errors are no longer being reported in the corporate media. Suggest further workaround of detaining at Guantanamo Bay register all non-corporate media modules that are incompatible with gaffe-filtering algorithm.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Back in the day, we had bugs the size of little bitty moths -- not like these modern, new-fangled, gargantuan bugs, the size of whole windows.
...and we were grateful!
...don't have bugs. They have random features.
They afixed the moth to the page as an example to other moths as if to say, "Befoul the innards of our machine and this shall happen to you".
Case #3: Rats nests inside the computers chewing on cables etc. Big problem at one Texas co-lo. Had to replace all the ethernet cabling.
Willow Run Labs of the University of Michigan (of BOMARC / Sidewinder fame) built their DIANA analog computer (those were the days) in an old bomber-plant hanger. Room with raised floor in giant wooden building built on a slab, in a rural area.
So of course some rats got into the area under the raised floor and started chewing up the cables.
So they got a cat. And they took out a square of raised floor. Cat would go out thorugh the guard station to do his business, then come back in and dive under the floor to do his work.
This being a classified site, there was a 24-hr guard. Everybody had their badge, which was left at the guard station when out, pinned on shirt when inside.
In good military tradition (for instance ship's cats and other working or mascot animals are on the personnel roster and recieve commendations and court-martials for exceptionally good or bad behavior), the cat was taken to the security office, photographed, assigned a number, and had a badge made.
And from then on, when the cat came in he'd stop at the guard station while the guard clipped his badge on his collar before he dived under the floor, and again on the way out for the badge to be removed.
The cat seemed to have no trouble with this procedure. (No doubt because he saw that everybody else had to go through the same thing - except for doing their own badge pinning.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way