The first ‘bug’

Press, 5 August 1981, Page 8

The first ‘bug’

NZPA New York For anyone who ever wondered about the origins of the term “hugs” as applied to things that go wrong in computers, Captain Grace Murray Hopper gave a firsthand explanation yesterday. The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty with the United States Navy, is the originator of electronic computer automatic programming and was a pioneer in computer technology during World War 11.

At the C.W. Post Centre of Long Island University yes terday, Mrs Hopper told a group of 150 Long Island public-school administrators that “bugs” in computers date back to a real bug — a moth.

At Harvard one August night in 1945, Mrs Hopper said, she and her associates were working on “the granddaddy of today’s computers, the Mark I.”

"Things were going badly, there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer." she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and. using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem. a moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” She said recently the veracity of her story was questioned and “I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons Centre, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question.”