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Anniversary of the First Computer Bug
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Sep 09, 2003 11:51 AM
from the am-i-bugging-you-yet dept.
from the am-i-bugging-you-yet dept.
aheath writes "According to the
US Naval Historical Center the first computer bug was logged on September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug. What is your favorite computer bug story?"
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It runs in the family... (Score:5, Funny)
September 9, 1945 at 15:45: "Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F [..] "
September 10, 1945 at 08:02: "Darl McBride Sr. claims he owns the moth."
September 10, 1945 at 23:53: "We snuck into Darl's room and put his hand in a bucket of warm water."
September 11, 1945 at 09:46: "Darl gets to work late but is proud to show us 'his' new bucket. We all hate him."
Re:It runs in the family... (Score:4, Funny)
September 10, 1945 at 13:25: Al Gore claims to have invented the moth.
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Re:and you forgot... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It runs in the family... (Score:4, Informative)
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R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is this the first actual case because they suspected before there were actual bugs in the system but never found them?
Then again maybe it was just prophetic. Like NASA when the STS missions launch(ed): "3...2...1...Liftoff! [message about this mission and it's 'first' for space here]"
Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
It hungered for recognition no less.
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, the blurb said that although it may have been the first computer bug, the term 'bug' had been used to refer to technical problems in radio operations for many years prior.
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
I know some software people who work this way.
On a different note, I wonder if ther are any operators who still keep logs.
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. It's on display in the Smithsonian. (Or was, anyway.)
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Usage of term predated moth (Score:5, Insightful)
Re-read parent - as he says, the way in which they wrote the log entry wouldn't make sense if that were true. They were being sarcastic when they affixed the moth to the log book, writing "First actual case of bug being found." This strongly implies that things were called "bugs" previously, but that they weren't literally insects. These guys had a sense of humor.
So the term was in use before these guys found the insect - this is simply the first incidence of the insect as in the urban legend, which postdates the original usage.
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Re:R-A-I-D?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
'First actual case of bug being found.'
Do you think they'd have written this if the word 'bug' didn't already exist?
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excellent propogation (Score:5, Funny)
Those things really multiply don't they?
First you find ONE in a computer relay. Then, almost sixty years later, they've multiplied so that there's one in every program I write.
Like cockroaches.
You just can't get rid of them. They're hard to find. And when you squash one, three more come from nowhere!
Re:excellent propogation (Score:5, Funny)
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Etymology (Score:5, Funny)
Cool. I always wondered about the etymology of "computer bug", and now I know the etymology is truly related to entymology.
Best bug ever (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Best bug ever (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go, with video. [cnn.com]
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Re:Best bug ever (Score:4, Funny)
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according to opera... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The origin of the word "bug" has wrongly been associated with an incident where a moth was pulled out of a Mark II computer. Apparently, the term was used prior to modern computers to mean an industrial or electrical defect."
term "Bug" was already in use (Score:5, Insightful)
The ultimate irony... (Score:5, Funny)
Another bug.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Odd, that.
And although it's not a bug, I have had someone bring a computer into my shop for locking up, and found a live mouse in it. It escaped into the shop and I believe it lives here on Dorito crumbs to this very day.
My Favorite Bug (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a bug which while in existance in your code has no effect until you happen to notice it, in the code. Then suddenly the effect of having this bug begins to appear. While until you noticed it, the effect never appeared and the program ran as intended.
And then there's the Heisenbug (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My Favorite Bug (Score:5, Informative)
That has got to be the most brief, yet entirely confusing description of that theory I've ever heard! =)
Some more facts [techtarget.com] may help clear up some confusion.
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my favourite bug (Score:4, Funny)
The "bug" in question was merely him and me modifying the same file every other day. I used i,j,k,z for iterator variables. He had the habit of using i,j,k,m. The file had 2 functions, one with a parameter z, the other with a parameter m.
I guess you can figure out how horrible such things can get. It took weeks before we figured out it was a naming issue.
Favorite Bug (Score:4, Funny)
Windows ME
"First actual case of bug being found" (Score:5, Informative)
The The Jargon File covers this and includes a picture of the bug in the entry on "bug [catb.org]" and states:
John.To Be Specific.... (Score:5, Informative)
See TechTV for more (Score:5, Informative)
I still think the bug in converting between metric and imperial units causing a billion dollar Mars probe to crash is the top one.
Regards,
--
*Art
Mainframe Story (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know if this counts, but here goes:
I worked as student help at a college that had a PDP-11 based mainframe. One night it went down. Computer techs were called out but could find nothing wrong. This continued night after night at about the same time each night. So the techs hung around after hours to keep an eye on it.
Around 6:30pm, the cleaning woman came in with her vaccuum cleaner. She promptly went over to the wall socket, unplugged the mainframe, plugged in her vaccuum cleaner and started vaccuuming the floor.
Re:Mainframe Story (Score:5, Funny)
Magic Switch Story
Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
GLS
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Re:Mainframe Story (Score:4, Funny)
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Another instance (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another instance (Score:5, Funny)
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my Spry Mosaic bug story (Score:5, Funny)
Turns out we had a bug in Spry Mosaic that, when it hit an empty IMG tag (as in, nothing else in the tag but the letters IMG), it would instantly crash. When I wrote up the document, I forgot to escape the less-than and greater-than marks, so it put the actual tag in the tech support document.
The upshot - when the tech support reps searched the database for 'crash in browser', one of the hits that would come up was the document I made - when they loaded it to see the details on 'crash in browser', that's exactly what they got. Ooops.
I can laugh about it now.
Actually, I laughed about it then, too.
Edison (Score:5, Informative)
From the OED:
b A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
Tech support horrors UPS (Score:5, Funny)
"What's wrong with it?" I asked, since there didn't seem to be any damage.
"It won't turn on," said he.
OK, no problem. As a technician we were allowed to pop open the PC to check if it was simply a cable or card that came loose during shipping. No problem. I pulled out my screwdriver and started undoing the case. Soon as popped the top a bunch of massive roaches scampered out.... followed by dozens of little miniature ones. Now, I HATE ROACHES. I can play with grasshoppers, earthworms, beetles, and other critters but roaches just give me the willies. The guy just looked at them marching around as if they were some little pets. With supreme effort I put everything back together and turned on the PC. It booted! The only sickenging thing was this flick-flick noise coming from the fan. I think there's a roach still lodged in the fan to this day, its little antennae wiggling, its nasty little legs twitching back and forth. flick-flick-flick...
(true story)
Self-Modifying Code (Score:5, Funny)
In college, around 1982, a friend had a micro by a company called Ohio Scientific, a Challenger something-or-other (I think that's right). The machine was running a BASIC interpreter, and had a character set that supported some simple games. Among the special characters supported were "tanks" in various orientations, so one could write a simple tank hunting game. Which he did.
We noticed when we started playing that we could move the tank offscreen and back, since he hadn't put any bounds checking to constrain the tank movement. When we toured too far offscreen, however, the program crashed.
We typed LIST to have a look at where bounds checking might be added to the code, and we found the runaway tank. Leaving a swath of blank spaces behind it, there was the tank character embedded in a line of BASIC source code...
'Debugging' as term for 'finding errors' is older (Score:5, Informative)
NOT Grace! According to the OED (Score:4, Informative)
b. A defect or fault in a machine, plan, or the like. orig. U.S.
1889 Pall Mall Gaz. 11 Mar 1/1 Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering 'a bug' in his phonograph-an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition
Quoted from Chapter 5 of The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike.
speaking of apollo (Score:5, Funny)
Apollos were well networked, and it was possible to manipulate the parameters of the windowing system on one machine from another machine (like you can with X Window system, given sufficient permissions).
The Apollos had a command to change the mouse speed (similar to the X "xset m" command). It took a numeric value specifying the pointer distance to travel per unit time. The bug was that if you specified a negative value, the mouse pointer would travel backwards. No big surprise really, and not very interesting.
When this bug was discovered but not yet fixed or widely known, someone decided to play a practical joke, and walked into a fellow hacker's office and sat at his workstation and started playing with his mouse. A few seconds later (with the help of a hidden assistant in another office), the hacker says, hey look, there's something wrong with your mouse, it's all backwards. Sure enough, the mouse is acting all upside-down. The prankster then says, hey, I know what's wrong, have you cleaned your mouse lately? You must have put your mouse ball in upside down. He then pops the mouse ball out and pops it back into the mouse, and sure enough (with hidden assistance), the mouse works normally again. The victim of the practical joke was, of course, entirely puzzled.
Favorite story (Score:5, Interesting)
horror stories (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it lists them, but doesn't really link to good stories -- so...
An error in a single FORTRAN statement resulted in the loss of the first American probe to Venus. [www-aix.gsi.de]
Software reboot during the Apollo 11 landing forced Armstrong to manually land the lunar lander. [nasa.gov]
An Iraqi Scud missile hit Dhahran barracks, leaving 28 dead and 98 wounded. The incoming missile was not detected by the Patriot defenses, whose clock had drifted
The Ariane 5 satellite launcher malfunction was caused by a faulty software exception routine resulting from a bad 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer conversion. [cornell.edu]
lots more here [queensu.ca] and here [nasa.gov].
My favorite bug report (Score:5, Funny)
Tracking #: 121144608
Title: Bush robot constantly makes grammatic mistakes and makes up words.
Problem Detail:
Corporate puppet robot model George W. Bush (serial #44625441) exhibits erratic grammatical behavior when deviating from scripted speeches. Often uses words like "subliminable", "methodological", "mispronunciated", "stregic", and "permanency" in place of their English equivalents. Platinum users (Haliburton, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron, Bechtel, Kenneth Lay) have noticed other erratic grammatical behavior, including such phrases as "is our children learning", "we need to make the pie higher", and "will the highways on the internet become more few". Strongly suspect some Jim Beam spilled into the model's grammar logic circuits during an all-night instructional binge session with Barbara and Jenna. Suggest immediate implementation of gaffe-filtering algorithm on all corporate media modules to limit the damage from this bug.
Problem Resolution:
Media filters in place as of 12 SEP 2001. Language errors are no longer being reported in the corporate media. Suggest further workaround of detaining at Guantanamo Bay register all non-corporate media modules that are incompatible with gaffe-filtering algorithm.
Re:Definitely a weird one.. (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine you have your first silicon back from the fab, never tested, using a brand new process with brand new drivers. You have one development board, because some short sighted, penny pincher manager couldn't imagine why you might want to get a few boards for testing. You turn it on, and the chip goes up, and down...andup....and down... Further investigation via copious TCL/TK scripts pinpoints the problem to the high speed link that provides the chip with it's incoming data.
"Damn you say", knowing that your alpha customers are mfg'ing boards using this chip as you sit there. Without that high speed serdes the chip is just a very expensive toaster. You know your customers have a second design with a competing chip that will be released in a few weeks (this was 5 years ago, when money was available for this).
You start to go through your tests on the buffers, first boundary scan tests, then signal integrity tests. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You probe the device using your handy multimeter and pressing on a pad under the chip, then with the other lead on some exposded trace. "It's connected, gotta be something internal". You can't see any signal integrity problems, nor connectivity problems. No fluctuations in power, no excessive noise, blame the IC team!
You have a bunch of guys restart their spice simulations with some uber accurate model that will take forever to run, and it comes back with no problems. You have the digital team rerun their test vectors, but nothing.
Finally you throw your hands in the air after a week of soldering, measuring, calculating, testing, etc. You send the board back to have the ASIC lifted and replaced with a new one. They x-ray the board, just to be sure they didn't crack any traces, and see something funny. Not a crack, but...foreign matter, and it's big. They put it under a magnifying glass and take a picture, which you put on your wall and remember forever.
The "bug" was a small ant, pressed between the ball of the BGA and the pad, which must have wandered across the board and become stuck before pick and place. Completely invisible, and smashed such that the ball barely made contact with the pad. Heat, vibration, humiditiy, and pressure (of, say, someone holding the chip down while trying to do a conductivity test), all making the difference between working and not working.
Sometimes there really are bugs in the system!
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