Who was the first person to discover the first computer bug?

Answer 1

Grace Hopper, USN. It was actually a moth that got caught between the contacts of relay #70 on panel F in an electromechanical computer at Harvard and got beaten to death. She found it taped it into the logbook with the problem description written by the technicians who had found and fixed the problem the night before. She added to their description "First actual case of bug being found.", but she was not the one that actually found it in the machine.

Answer 2

The first bug was literally a bug. A moth got caught in a vacuum tube of the first computer, causing the inventors to have to take apart the whole machine to find the problem. This was at Havard in 1947.

The term "bug" had been in use for any malfunction or error of a machine long before electronic digital computers existed.

Its first use referring to a computer problem was on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer, when a moth got smashed inside the contacts of a relay causing a failure. When the failure was located and the moth removed from the relay, the operator on that shift taped it to the logbook below the entry on the failure and labeled it First Computer Bug. That morning Grace Murray Hopper came on duty and read the logbook and thought it was a great story to tell every time she spoke somewhere. The first computer bug wasn't even in an electronic computer, the Harvard Mark II was electromechanical.

The machine did NOT have to be completely taken apart, only the one relay with the moth trapped in it needed to be adjusted and cleaned after removing the dead moth.

Answer 3

The first explicitly identified computer bug was a moth, smashed to death in a relay on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer.
The first bug was a moth found in the Mark II computer by Grace Murry Hopper in 1947 after WWII Am employee left a door open long enough for a fly to fly into the main frame of the computer to cause it to crash.

Answer 4

A technician working on the Harvard Mark II relay based computer, the bug was a moth that had been smashed in the contacts of one of the machine's relays causing it to fail. He taped it in the logbook next to the description of the failure. Grace Hopper found it the next morning and decided it would be a neat story to tell.

Answer 5

The very first "bug" wasn't a computer bug as we know today

It was a butterfly trapped inside the tower, hence the term "bug"

The first documented "bug" in a computer was a badly hammered moth caught in the relay contacts of the electromechanical Harvard Mark II computer. It had gotten into the relay and was pounded to death as the contacts kept trying to close for hours as the engineers tried to locate the problem. It was immediately taped in to the logbook and is still there.

Unfortunately the term "bug" for a technical problem does not originate here, it has been traced back to the 1870s and it is unknown if any actual insects were involved there.

Viruses are a totally different issue, they are self replicating programs deliberately written by a person, usually to do harm. I believe the first ones appeared shortly after the IBM PC, on IBM PCs. These spread on floppy disk boot sectors.

Answer 6

Yes and no. A 'bug' is defined as a type of insect that has a set of hard wing covers. One example is the ladybug. So, "No".

In 1947, the Harvard Mark II computer experienced a problem when a moth (which is not a 'bug') got into a mechanical relay and was squashed in it. So, "Yes".

Answer 7

Bill Clinton