Slashdot Mirror
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?"
according to opera...
"The origin of the word "bug" has wrongly been associated with an incident where a moth was pulled out of a Mark II computer. Apparently, the term was used prior to modern computers to mean an industrial or electrical defect."
Why do I h8 apple?
When I was doing inhouse tech support for a large company that makes green tractors, I got a ticket about a system that was having random lockups. After investigating, I found that the lockups were indeed random, so set out to try swapping the RAM first. Judge of my surprise to find a tiny spider caught against the base of a SIMM, blackened and crispy. If someone had told me that there's enough juice flowing through a RAM chip to fry even a spider, I wouldn't've believed it, but there the little critter was. I couldn't believe that little bug alone would be causing a problem, but on a whim I left the chip in, sans spider, and behold, the system worked perfectly.
Odd, that.
And although it's not a bug, I have had someone bring a computer into my shop for locking up, and found a live mouse in it. It escaped into the shop and I believe it lives here on Dorito crumbs to this very day.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The Schrodenbug...named after the Theroy of Schrodinger's cat...where by if you put a cat in a box, its not truely dead until you look at it again...
This is a bug which while in existance in your code has no effect until you happen to notice it, in the code. Then suddenly the effect of having this bug begins to appear. While until you noticed it, the effect never appeared and the program ran as intended.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Here are some bad bugs.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Well, except that instead of miscalculating your home budget you could rain nuclear destruction upon the world...
Perhaps the most influential bugs of all time were those that allowed the Morris worm to propogate. Sendmail, fingerd, rsh/rexec.. all to blame. The worm led to the formation of CERT. Quite influential.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The term bug when referring to a flaw in a mechanism does NOT originate in the coputer machinery of 1945. In fact, it is much older, and is traceable to as far back as Tom Edison:
On November 18, 1878, Edison wrote to Theodore Puskas, "It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition--and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that--"Bugs"--as such little faults and difficulties are called--show themselves and mo nths of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success--or failure--is certainly reached" (Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography, John Wiley & Sons, 1992, page 198).
I call bullshit on this one. A Google search of this phrase yields nothing.
"byte under guard" indeed. Who moderated this +5 ? We need "moderation under guard" (MUG(tm)) here!
I used to work on debuggers. The hardest bugs to find were bugs in the debugger. Why? You have to debug the debugger.
The absolute hardest bug I ever tracked down was actually a kernel bug. When single-stepping in assembly over a branch-shadow instruction, the application state was corrupted. It only happened on one particular model of RISC chip and only with a certain version of the kernel. Bleh!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
You're watching something different than me, then.
I see him laughing, taking it in stride, and then making the joke "that must be why we aren't shipping it yet!"
Yeah, hate MSFT or Gates all you want, that video showed a little "grace under fire" IMO.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The record is humorous. The word 'bug' had long been used. But this was the first time it was due to a real insect.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
An ATM at a branch of the bank that I worked at developed a fault wherein it incorrectly reported its location. A guy used the machine while on a business trip. When his statement arrived it looked as if he had been somewhere else at the time. His wife accused him of lying and having an affair.
Eventually the bank was contacted and the fault confirmed, but by then the statement data had been archived to tape. We had to patch the archive statement suite to check each and every archive statement transaction request for the erroneous one and then modify it on-the fly to return the corrected information. The patch stayed in for many years until the data was migrated to new archive devices, when the data was permanently corrected.
Of course that was just one single transaction. There were probably hundreds that were wrong and who knows what happened in all those other cases.
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
I heard this story first (or possibly second) hand in Sweden; specifically Goteborg.
So, this is for admissions for dental school, about 5 years ago. Some bug causes the students with the _lowest_ test scores to be admitted.
The error is discovered but then the admission decisions have already been sent out. The school finds it inhumane to retract the offers those who have been admitted in error. However, they also find it unfair for the most qualified students: it is decided to admit both groups.
The funniest part is that rumor has it that there was no significant difference in performance between the two groups.
Tor
She said that when her colleagues would complain about the latency of satellite communication, she would pull out her "nanoseconds" and explain, "You see, sir, there's an awful lot of these between here and there."
It school in the late '70s, they purchased a second PDP 11-34, and the sys admins thought "wouldn't it be cool if we could get the two machines to communicate!" So they connected a serial port on one to a serial port on the other. Tried to send a packet... Boom! Both machines immediately crashed. Rebooted, reconnected the serial port, started a send, crashed again. Finally, it dawned on them... they hadn't disabled terminal echo. When the first character was sent, it was immediately echoed by the second machine, then echoed by the first, etc. Comm interrupts were high priority and a lot of overhead on the PDP, so the machines never left the interrupt handler, and essentially were hung.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well, he said, there was this funky wired up typewriter type thing that was the data input. Once you entered your problem and the computer finished calculating it, you had to open a door and WALK INSIDE THE COMPUTER and count the lightbulbs. On = 1, off = zero. There were banks of bulbs...
He said the computer itself was huge and took up most of a warehouse in Northern Virginia. This was all in the late 1940s, and he worked for the Pentagon. He said the pocket calculator he got for opening a bank account was more powerful than the humungus machine he had to deal with in the 40s.
Sorta puts things in perspective.
I asked him about reliability of components, and he said they had a problem with mice for a while, but due to the large voltages this thing ran on, it was usually a self correcting pest problem, and one easily detected: the smell of burning fur is rather distinctive...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Taking logs...
Not computers but my days in the Navy were all about logs. Every 15 minutes. We logged, calculated and signed everything, about 50 parameters on the nuclear reactor plant control panel alone. Funny thing was I got VERY sea sick. Not a problem on a submarine when it is submerged but pure hell for me on the surface as a submarine bobs like a cork and has no windows to see the horizon for my internal reference. I would utilize a garbage bag about every 15 minutes until we hit the end of the continental shelf and could submerge which took about about 6-8 hours on the east coast, and under 2 hours on the west coast to reach. To try to limit my sickness I took motion sickness pills (they were commonly refered to as the pink pussy pills). These worked a little but limited my straight on vision. Basically I could not see things things very well that I looked at directly but could see the peripheral things. Odd situation since I was the reactor operator. The puking, lack of 100% vision and the emotional issues of knowing your leaving the world for a few months made this an interesting experience.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I have been developing code for 30 years now.
Early on in my career, in the era of large decks of punch cards, I dropped a deck of cards on the floor.
I picked them up and put them back in the right order (an ugly job).
When the job was submitted and the print-out eventually returned (1 day turnaround), the compile failed. I was surprised as the deck was basically unchanged from a previous run.
I checked the output and discovered a syntax error. I then checked the card deck and discovered an insect that had gotten squished into a hole punched in a card, which changed the resultant character and caused the syntax error.
Nowadays, my bugs are all my very own.
Back to unit testing ...
Upon opening the box, we found a mouse had been living in the box, died in the box, mumified in the box, and finally his old nest caught fire (well, maybe not on fire, but blacked it). We're not sure how long the mouse had been in there, but it was long enough to gently bake him to perfect mumification. The theory was that with all the moving going on, the mouse had gotten in through a propped open door, through an open accessory panel in the back, and made a nice nest in the warm computer. How he actually died, we're not sure. Maybe he killed himself from the misery of NT 3.5.1 because *I* sure entertained the idea.
Then there was the time we found out that the entire DNS for our networks in France was on an LCD 486 laptop, originally used to test the DNS setup, but then it never got updated at production, and had been running for about 2 years before it failed (we found it sitting on a desk in an abandoned office, the original employee long since moved on).
During the industrial year of my degree (mumble) years ago, my first task was to modify a Fortran 77 engineering program which calculated intersection points between two pipes, so the correct cuts could be made and the pipes joined. We're talking big pipes here - the company built the Syney Harbour Bridge and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building in Hong Kong.
Lacking the modern tools we all love, debugging tended to be done by printing values at pertinent points. When the code was correct, I removed them all... and it broke; I put them back in and it worked; commented them out and it still worked; deleted the comments... and it broke again! These were basic, fundamental print statements, no fancy function calls with side effects. I eventually ended up with two 100+ page listings of the object code (working and non-working) side by side on the floor and had to compare the lot by hand until I found the difference, near the bottom of course!
It turned out to be a bug in the PDP Fortran compiler. It was incorrectly generating two identical labels in the same code block, but for whatever reason they were together in the working version and had a register being reset to zero between them in the broken version - the JMP was going to the second and therefore not resetting the register.
As an undergraduate at the time, I was in despair... my first 'real' job and I couldn't fix a simple program - little did I know what the final cause would be - nearly put me off software development for life! Bloody DEC and their shonky compiler, they didn't even give the company a free upgrade when the fix came out!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.