The History of Computing by Doron Swade

Author:Doron Swade [Swade, Doron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192567642
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Bugs

There is not much humour let alone whimsy in computer history. So the story of the computer bug must be told. Aiken supervised the design of the Mark II, the first of three machines to follow the Mark I. One day in 1947, the year it was completed, a fault arose and the malfunction was traced to a moth that had got stuck between a pair of relay contacts. The hapless moth was taped into the logbook above an entry ‘First actual case of a bug being found’. ‘Bug’ had been in use at least since 1878 by Thomas Edison, as a name for a technical fault or glitch. But this well-evidenced folkloric tale, based on a pun, has been widely adopted as the origin story of the use of ‘bug’ and ‘debugging’ for faults, fault-finding and fixing malfunctions in programs, hardware, and engineering.

Grace Hopper, a newly commissioned naval officer, assigned to Aiken’s team in 1943, made the logbook entry. Hopper had a lifelong career in computing, making major contributions to computer programming and computer software. She wrote the first widely used compiler—a program that translates instructions, written in abbreviated English (source code), into the internal codes for execution by machine. She was also instrumental in the development of the computer language COBOL, widely used for business applications.

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