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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?
...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.
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.
Seen on the license plate of a VW Beetle: FEATURE
Arbitrary sig
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.
From the OED:
b A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
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!
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