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Anniversary of the First Computer Bug

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the am-i-bugging-you-yet dept.

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?"

7 of 398 comments (clear)

  1. according to opera... by ih8apple · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  2. Another bug.. by Verteiron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. My Favorite Bug by haplo21112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Best bug ever by stratjakt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!!!!
  5. Re:To Be Specific.... by mph · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I actually saw Adm. Hopper (ret.) on the Dave Letterman show quite a few years ago. Even in her old age, she was very animated and lucid. She brought with her a bundle of wires cut to about 30 cm in length. Dave asked her what they were, and she said that they were "nanoseconds" (i.e. light-nanoseconds).

    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."

  6. Favorite story by El · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  7. My bug story by seniorcoder · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Well, I thought I was the only one with a real bug story, but this posting proves I wasn't the first. Nonetheless ......

    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 ...