Today we will see what was the first “bug” in history and why it receives such a movie name. Everything makes sense. It makes more sense than you might imagine.
The Harvard Butterfly
It all goes back to the year 1947, when a group of engineers were working on a computer called Mark II at Harvard University. Everything was fine until the PC shut down without warning. Wow, a bug, but why did they call it that?
The problem didn’t come from a programming error or a human error, everything came from that, from a bug, which for those who don’t know that means bug in English. And that’s it, an open window and a rogue moth had been the cause. It flew to one of the computer’s relays, jammed there, and caused the computer to crash.
When they removed the bug, they saved it and pasted it in a log next to the sentence First real bug case found.
Since that day, any programming error or that has a computer we call it bug. So much so that even today, problems that have nothing to do with computers are also called that. And that’s what would tell us that a moth would change the way we see things more than half a century later.
So much so that even programs that help detect and eliminate computer errors are officially called debuggers.
It should also be added that this computer was not like what we know today, but it weighed 25 tons and its cables occupied 370 square meters. So it is normal for a moth to settle there, what is strange is that they find it easily among so many machines.
A curious case that marked the name of this word that we use so much and that until today, like me, you surely did not know why it was called that. But hey, now every time you listen to it you’ll remember it, you’ll see.
This logbook is now part of the collection of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between its pages, this moth is still there, intact, in view of thousands of people every year.. One of the most famous bugs in the world, for the simple fact of going to die inside a computer.
Its official date, according to the book, would be September 9, 1947 at 3:45 PM. We don’t know why they wanted to keep it, it was just an error produced by a bug, something we don’t believe was the first time it happened in the world, however, these young people engineers were having fun and marking the future of this first known bug.
