ZMT: Daily Fact: When an early computer bug proved to be an actual insect

Daily Fact: When an early computer bug proved to be an actual insect

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Original photos by Lorenzo Herrera/ Unsplash

One of the first computer bugs was an actual bug.

At 3:45 p.m. on September 9, 1947, a computer programmer working on the Mark II at Harvard recorded in a logbook that the team had discovered the "first actual case of [a] bug being found." But the programmer wasn't referring to some poorly written lines of code — this was an actual bug. A moth, to be exact, which had flown into a room where the Mark II, one of the world's first computers, was housed at the university. Attracted by the warmth of the 25-ton machine, the winged creature met its end in one of the many electromagnetic relay contacts. The team removed the moth with tweezers.

While this event is often mistakenly cited as the birth of the programming term "bug" to mean a flaw or imperfection, the word had actually been used in engineering circles for over half a century. But the 1947 moth misadventure was popularized by Grace Hopper, a mathematician and computer science pioneer who worked with the team as they "debugged" the Mark II. Early computers such as Harvard's Mark series were responsible for other modern computer programming lingo, though: For example, a "patch" comes from the punched cards used in early machines that programmers physically "patched" with tape to fix errors. Today, the original Mark II logbook — with the original "bug" taped to it — is at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Number of truckloads it took to transport the Mark II after it was bought by the Navy in 1948

Estimated number of individual insects alive at any time

10 quintillion

Size (in feet) of the wingspan of Mothra, a moth-inspired Japanese movie monster

803

The amount the U.S. spent (both government and private companies) patching the Y2K bug

$100 billion

"Spam" took on the additional meaning of junk email thanks to a sketch by the British comedy troupe Monty Python.

The sketch begins with a simple request: A couple in a diner wants to order food. Unfortunately, the proprietor of the establishment serves a very Spam-heavy menu, including "Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam baked beans Spam Spam Spam and Spam." Originally airing on Monty Python's Flying Circus in 1970, the sketch later became associated with annoying floods of data, ads, or massive amounts of useless text. The word likely first appeared online in late 1980s MUDs (multi-user dungeons), where users could "spam the database" by using a program to create lots of objects in the shared digital space, among other pesky, repetitive behaviors. By 1990, archived MUD chats show that the use of the term "spam," along with its sketch comedy origins, had been officially established.

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Daily Fact: When an early computer bug proved to be an actual insect