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?"

Comments

according to opera...

[ih8apple]

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."

Another bug..

[Verteiron]

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.

My Favorite Bug

[haplo21112]

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.