🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb4.0...@agate.berkeley.edu> b...@alfa.berkeley.edu
(Brad Sherman) writes:
>
> I have heard a number of versions of a story about a moth
> flying into a relay of an early electro-mechanical computer.
> The moth gets taped into the system log book.
> The use of "bug" meaning computer problem is born.
> Can someone attest to moth in the logbook story?
> (First- or second- hand sources preferred.)

I guess being a packrat has its uses.  I'm looking at a much-xeroxed page
from "The Laboratory <unreadable>", U.S. Naval Weapons Lab, Dahlgren VA.
Vol 45 no 36, but date unreadable.  Given the 1947 date and the 26 years
quoted in the caption this must have been published circa 1973 or so.

Those who don't want to see this, please skip this posting...

DO YOU KNOW THE ORIGIN OF THE WORD "DE-BUG"?
BILL BURKE IS THE OWNER OF THE ORIGINAL COMPUTER BUG.

In 1946 and 1947, Bill Burke, Head of the Computer Operations Branch (KOO)
and Ed Culhan, KEE, were at Harvard constructing the Aiken Relay Calculator,
more commonly refered to as MARK II.  Named after Professor Howard Aiken,
Head of Harvard's Computation Laboratory, the system operated with several
thousand electrical [sic] mechanical relays.  (Ralph, A. Niemann, Head of 
the Warfare Analysis Department, was one of the first civilian programmers
hired at the University to work on MARK II.)

In September 1947, the programmer and the engineers were having difficulty
getting a program to run.  After much exploration and much head scratching,
a moth was found trapped inside one of the relay cases of the calculator.
It had been beaten to death by the triggering of the relay.  The bug was
enshrined in the machine's log with Scotch tape and now resides in Bill
Burke's desk drawer in C-107, K Department.

For the record -- the moth removed from MARK II is the origin of the word
"debugging" and it is owned by NWL, and not displayed in the Smithsonian,
as has been reported, and it was removed from the Aiken Relay Calculator.

[Caption of picture 1:] "TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD-MEMORIES. Going clockwise:
Bill Burke, Ed Culhan, and Ralph Niemann consider the well-preserved insect
secured in the MARK II log which gave a new word to the English language.
 
[Caption of picture 2:] "The first computer "bug" really was this moth,
much smaller of course." [the picture makes it about 3" long! -zben]

-- 
Sig     DS.L    ('ZBen')       ; Ben Cranston <zb...@Trantor.UMD.EDU>
* Network Infrastructures Group, Computer Science Center
* University of Maryland at College Park
* of Ulm