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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,
Somehow, saying "First actual case of bug being found" seems fake to me. It's like finding cavalry sword from the first world war with the inscription, "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.
Or is this the first actual case because they suspected before there were actual bugs in the system but never found them?
Then again maybe it was just prophetic. Like NASA when the STS missions launch(ed): "3...2...1...Liftoff! [message about this mission and it's 'first' for space here]"
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
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
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?
By the way they logged the bug, "first actual case of bug being found" the term was already in use and they were pointing out the irony that the bug in this case was a real bug
Free cell phone tracking
...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.
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.
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
The The Jargon File covers this and includes a picture of the bug in the entry on "bug" and states:
John.To be specific, that first bug was recorded by future Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper, a (rare female) Line Navy officer (as opposed to a WAVE or Naval Reserve officer.) Her name has gone on to one of the most modern guided missile destroyers. She was quite a remarkable woman, read up on her career if you get the chance.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I still think the bug in converting between metric and imperial units causing a billion dollar Mars probe to crash is the top one.
Regards,
--
*Art
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.
It depends. If he was trying to show that the SCO jokes are as old and tired as the Al Gore jokes then he is very witty. Otherwise he is just a moron.
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..."
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.
Re-read parent - as he says, the way in which they wrote the log entry wouldn't make sense if that were true. They were being sarcastic when they affixed the moth to the log book, writing "First actual case of bug being found." This strongly implies that things were called "bugs" previously, but that they weren't literally insects. These guys had a sense of humor.
So the term was in use before these guys found the insect - this is simply the first incidence of the insect as in the urban legend, which postdates the original usage.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The log entry with the moth is from September 9, 1947, not 1945.
From the OED:
b A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
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)
Separately, Tenner points out that 'bug' was used by telegraphers as the name for hidden faults in circuits, and that it also had a literal meaning for operators, since Western Union offices were notoriously dirty and insect-infested. In 1868, Thomas Edison, who started as a telegraph operator, invented an early version of an electrical zapper to debug his desktop.
My favorite bug was on a high speed ATM chip designed a few years back. I have heard this story retold by many, and I have nothing but sympathy for the poor guy doing the testing.
Imagine you have your first silicon back from the fab, never tested, using a brand new process with brand new drivers. You have one development board, because some short sighted, penny pincher manager couldn't imagine why you might want to get a few boards for testing. You turn it on, and the chip goes up, and down...andup....and down... Further investigation via copious TCL/TK scripts pinpoints the problem to the high speed link that provides the chip with it's incoming data.
"Damn you say", knowing that your alpha customers are mfg'ing boards using this chip as you sit there. Without that high speed serdes the chip is just a very expensive toaster. You know your customers have a second design with a competing chip that will be released in a few weeks (this was 5 years ago, when money was available for this).
You start to go through your tests on the buffers, first boundary scan tests, then signal integrity tests. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You probe the device using your handy multimeter and pressing on a pad under the chip, then with the other lead on some exposded trace. "It's connected, gotta be something internal". You can't see any signal integrity problems, nor connectivity problems. No fluctuations in power, no excessive noise, blame the IC team!
You have a bunch of guys restart their spice simulations with some uber accurate model that will take forever to run, and it comes back with no problems. You have the digital team rerun their test vectors, but nothing.
Finally you throw your hands in the air after a week of soldering, measuring, calculating, testing, etc. You send the board back to have the ASIC lifted and replaced with a new one. They x-ray the board, just to be sure they didn't crack any traces, and see something funny. Not a crack, but...foreign matter, and it's big. They put it under a magnifying glass and take a picture, which you put on your wall and remember forever.
The "bug" was a small ant, pressed between the ball of the BGA and the pad, which must have wandered across the board and become stuck before pick and place. Completely invisible, and smashed such that the ball barely made contact with the pad. Heat, vibration, humiditiy, and pressure (of, say, someone holding the chip down while trying to do a conductivity test), all making the difference between working and not working.
Sometimes there really are bugs in the system!
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 actuall real bug was taped into the book because it was an actual *real* bug. The Pun was intended back then aswell. The term debugging had been used earlier when debugging ENIAC (real bugs too) and finding unusual and nerving errors.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
b. A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
1889 Pall Mall Gaz. 11 Mar 1/1 Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering 'a bug' in his phonograph-an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition
Quoted from Chapter 5 of The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike.
Fellowship 9/11
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.
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
>The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug.
.36 seconds during the 4-day continuous siege, the error increasing with elapsed time since the system was turned on. This software flaw prevented real-time tracking. The specifications called for aircraft speeds, not Mach 6 missiles, for 14-hour continuous performance, not 100. Patched software arrived via air one day later.
Yeah, it lists them, but doesn't really link to good stories -- so...
An error in a single FORTRAN statement resulted in the loss of the first American probe to Venus.
Software reboot during the Apollo 11 landing forced Armstrong to manually land the lunar lander.
An Iraqi Scud missile hit Dhahran barracks, leaving 28 dead and 98 wounded. The incoming missile was not detected by the Patriot defenses, whose clock had drifted
The Ariane 5 satellite launcher malfunction was caused by a faulty software exception routine resulting from a bad 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer conversion.
lots more here and here.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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
Reminds me of the time we found a Z80 (yes, this was a while ago) that we could talk into fits!
I delidded the IC in the reliability lab. It was a plastic case so I had to fire up the bunsen and boil sulfuric acid and use a dropper (fun process!).
Under the microsope I found that one of the gold leads was just laying on the pin pad. It made enough conatct for the CPU to work -- unless you got real close and said something in a low tone and at just the right, fairly quiet volume.
For the experience, I feel I know a lot more about the internal workings of women.
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 ...
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