The history of a "bug"

Where does the word a "bug" in a program come from? I heard it was that someone had an actual bug in their computer or something. Tell me if you know. :D

I read somewhere that it was first used at an airforce base where their systems went down and they spent hours trying to figure it out, when all that had happened was a moth flew into a printer and jammed it up. If I remember where i read that I'll post it.

Yes, that's correct. The first 'computer bug' was in fact a bug in the computer.

Quzah.

hmmm...I guess that is when they started putting the casing over the hardware.

--Garfield

The term 'bug' stemmed from the fact that insects were in fact attracted by the warm electronics (tubes, transformers, nixies, etc.) If a calculation malfunction occured, sometimes it was due to a 'bug' having gotten in and gotten itself positioned such that it shorted across contacts.

The term "bug" originated when a moth crawled into an old tube-type computer and died. Operators had to remove the "bug" before the machine would work properly and the term stuck.

enjoy.

My god, I thought there was no thing worse than a
segmentation fault :)

The story I've heard (and this one I 've heard multiple times, so I believe this to be the most accurate) were some computer operators at a large company (don't recall the name). They couldn't get a program to work. After some time searching (hours?), someone discovered a bug between the contacts of a part in the computer. The bug was removed and the program worked fine. Hence, debugging.

When I first heard it, there was more detail (the name of the company and a little more background), but I wasn't overly interested so I didn't memorize it.

Ultimately, maybe it was a university, government, business, who really knows.

But the fact of the matter is that a bug had shorted out some contacts on a computer which caused a program not to work.

Now bug is just a reference.