A Blast from the Past – have you “debugged” your program?


Anyone that has written any type of code for their phone, whether an actual program or a script, has told someone “there is a bug in my program,” when things are not working quite right.   A rather interesting piece of history is the use of the term “bug” when describing a problem with computer technology.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR, (1906-1992) was working with her associates at Harvard on August, 1947 (at which time, she was a Commander).  They were working on the “granddaddy” of modern computers, the Mark II.  Things were not working as planned and there was something wrong with one of the circuits of the computer.  She said “Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” (The remains of the moth was taped to the long book and a picture has been attached to this article.)

In the late 1940s, the term “bug” referred only to problems with hardware, but in the mid 1950’s, Hopper extended the term to refer to programming errors as well.  This brings us to why the author has written this article – it serves as a reminder to everyone where we’ve been and how far we’ve traveled in technology.

To put all this in perspective, I leave you with the following quote:

“Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons.”

Popular Mechanics, March 1949.


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