History of IT: Why is it a Bug?!

 Have you ever stopped to wonder why we call bugs by that name?

On September 9th, 1947, engineers were working on a system at Harvard known as Mark II. A problem occurred where a relay was not behaving correctly. The engineers did their troubleshooting and found a bug in the system. Specifically, it was a moth that had gotten stuck inside of a relay.

The team was working under Grace Hopper, an interesting person in her own right and has a name close enough to a bug herself! Her team documented the issue in their logbook and taped the moth onto the page. Next to the moth, they wrote "First actual case of bug being found." The logbook is in the possession of the Smithsonian.

Despite this, it's not the first time the term bug had been used, it's just the first in a computer system. The term had been used since at least the 1800s by engineers to describe mechanical issues. This incident was what had helped make the term bug stick to computer terminology.

If we look more in the 1800s, around 1878, Thomas Edison used the term in a latter: It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.'

In 1924, there was a comic that indicated telephone repair men were called "bug hunters." In an article, it highlighted a veteran repairman who spend 22 years "shooting bugs."

There are many other instances of the term "bug" being used long before it landed in computers. Regardless, this moth was a bug in the system, literally and figuratively.