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The Debunker: Was a Moth in a Navy Computer the First "Bug"?

by Ken Jennings

January 1, 2017 isn't just New Year's Day… it's also the Internet's 34rd birthday. On January 1, 1983, all the computer systems on the ARPANET, created by the Department of Defense in 1969, were required to switch over to the TCP/IP network protocol that it still uses today, giving birth to the Internet as we know it. But how well do we know it? Onetime computer programmer (and Jeopardy! computer victim) Ken Jennings is here to do a complete systems update on all the Digital Age spam in your mental inbox.

The Debunker: Was a Moth in a Navy Computer the First "Bug"?

Grace Hopper was one of the greatest computer pioneers of the 20th century. "Amazing Grace" was a math whiz with a Ph.D from Yale who joined the Naval Reserve during World War II and worked on the early computers that made the Manhattan Project possible. After the war, she helped create UNIVAC, America's first commercial computer; wrote the first compiler in history; and was instrumental in developing early programming languages like COBOL and FORTRAN. By the time she retired from the Navy in 1986, she had achieved the rank of Rear Admiral. Last November, President Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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And yet, when Google designed one of its special daily "Doodle" logos to honor Hopper in 2013, the big finish was…a moth flying out of the punch card slot in the final letter 'e.' That's right: despite the fact that modern computers wouldn't exist without Grace Hopper, she's largely remembered in the popular imagination for a single 1947 journal entry. Her team found a moth trapped between two relays of the Mark II computer at Harvard, and fixed the problem by removing the moth. "First actual case of bug being found," she wrote. As a result, it's widely believed that our modern terms "computer bug" and "debugging" originated with Hopper.

Well, the moth was real—in fact, it's still taped to Hopper's journals at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum in Dahlgren, Virginia—but the story isn't, not really. Hopper was joking about this 1947 computer "bug" being literal because the word was already in common usage as a synonym for "problem" in engineering circles. As early as 1878, Thomas Edison was writing to an inventor colleague about "bugs—as such little faults and difficulties are called." Merriam-Webster's has citations for "debugging" going back to 1944, three years before Hopper's bug. The usage presumably comes from "bug"'s original meaning: a malicious monster, as still evidence in words like "bugaboo" and "bugbear." Grace Hopper's moth may have been the most famous mechanical bug in history, but it certainly wasn't the first.

Quick Quiz: What 1959 sci-fi novel and subsequent movie are about a war against the "Bugs," arachnoid monsters from outer space?

Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.