On September 9, 1947, a team of engineers at Harvard University were running tests on a giant computer called the Mark II. The machine was the size of a room, made of thousands of relays clicking like tiny metal jaws. Something kept going wrong. The team poked around inside until they found the culprit - a moth wedged into one of the relays, dead from the heat. They taped the moth right into the lab logbook with the note: 'First actual case of bug being found.'
The team's leader was a famous computer scientist named Grace Hopper, who later helped invent modern programming languages. She loved the story and told it for the rest of her life. The word 'bug' was already used by engineers to mean a glitch, but this moth - now in the Smithsonian's collection - is the most famous one ever.
Today, every time a programmer says 'there's a bug in my code,' they're echoing a moment from 1947 when a literal insect crashed a computer. The original logbook page, moth and all, sits in a museum case in Washington, D.C., still readable after almost 80 years.
