Ironically or shall I say literally, the first literal computer bug in the history of computers was a real-life moth. In 1947, an actual moth stuck in the relay of the Mark II computer at Harvard University caused the computer to malfunction.

Grace Hopper, a renowned computer programmer at Harvard, was part of the team that discovered the moth. They removed and taped it into their logbook, noting it as the “First actual case of a bug being found.”

They joked that this was the first case of real “debugging,”. Even though the terms “bug”, and “debugging,” had already been used in engineering, this moth incident became a famous story.

But, the moth found in 1947 is not the first bug!

Thanks to Hopper's team, it is the first documented case of a literal moth being found. But computer bugs have been around since the very first computers.

Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1840s. She wrote the instructions for the Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, now regarded as the world’s first algorithm.

Since Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built completely, her algorithm was never run in her lifetime. However, there’s speculation that had her algorithm been executed on a working machine, it might have contained logical errors — thus, possibly making her responsible for the first “software bug,” though it would have been more theoretical than literal.

The term “bug” was FIRST used by Thomas Edison to describe problems or malfunctions in his electrical devices in the late 1800s. In his 1876 notes on his lighting inventions, one of his entries reads, “Awful lot of bugs still.” Two years later, in an 1878 letter to his associate, Edison described an error in his quadruplex telegraph system as a “bug,” marking one of the earliest known uses of the term about a mechanical or system flaw. He continued to use “bug” to describe design or operational flaws in his inventions.

To sum up,

Ada Lovelace’s work had the first conceptual software bug even before the coining of the term ‘bug’ by Edison. And Grace Hopper’s team debugged the first literal bug, which is more of a hardware bug that circulated as a joke of the ‘first actual case of bug being found‘.

End notes

While I stare at the screen trying to fix the bugs, I cannot but admire the women in computer history:

1. Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer wrote the very first algorithm with minimal ‘conceptual bugs’. The fact that Lovelace anticipated concepts like loops, conditional logic, and computation far before modern computers existed is a testament to her genius. Her work remains highly respected, even with these small bugs, because it laid the foundation for future programming.

2. Grace Hopper is one hell of a woman. And it’s worthy to mention her contributions here beyond the moth incident:

   • She invented the first compiler, which is a program that translates high-level programming languages into machine code.

   • She was one of the primary developers of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), a programming language specifically designed for business applications.

   • She reached the rank of Rear Admiral in the US Navy later in her career after her extensive contributions to computing and her service during and after World War II.

✌ Peace out