Anniversary of the First Computer Bug

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?"

R-A-I-D?!?!

[inertia187]

Somehow, saying "First actual case of bug being found" seems fake to me. It's like finding cavalry sword from the first world war with the inscription, "Corporal James Smith, Third Mounted Infantry, World War One." You'd know that even if the sword was real, the inscription was years after WWII, making it less valuable, and lessening it's voracity.

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]"

term "Bug" was already in use

[asmithmd1]

By the way they logged the bug, "first actual case of bug being found" the term was already in use and they were pointing out the irony that the bug in this case was a real bug

Re:R-A-I-D?!?!

[Wakkow]

It's where the term "bug", as we now know it, came from. Thus, that was the "first bug". Sure there were problems with the code/vacuum tubes/whatever before, but they never called it a "bug" until then.

Re:and you forgot...

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends. If he was trying to show that the SCO jokes are as old and tired as the Al Gore jokes then he is very witty. Otherwise he is just a moron.

Re:Mainframe Story

[Damn_Canuck]

Remarkably, this is the same urban legend story that happened in various hospitals worldwide where several patients mysteriously died nightly in the same wing of the hospital... until it was found that a janitor was coming around and unplugging the life support systems to plug in the floor buffer...

Wouldn't a mainframe require a different power socket for a vaccuum cleaner? Or is this one UBER-vaccuum?

Usage of term predated moth

[siskbc]

It's where the term "bug", as we now know it, came from. Thus, that was the "first bug". Sure there were problems with the code/vacuum tubes/whatever before, but they never called it a "bug" until then.

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.

HAL 9000 "Bug"?

[Bilbo]

I know about HAL in the story "2001", but I don't remember anything that could be called a "bug". HAL was operating according to the instructions of its original programmers, instructions which the actual astronauts had no knowledge of. This led to HAL killing off several of the crew, but other than that, I don't remember it actually malfunctioning. It was programmed to proceed to it's target at all costs, and that's what it did.

What am I missing?

(The linked articles didn't give any hints either.)

Before 1945 the term "Bug" was already in use

[Pooklord]

to indicate some sort of mechanical defect or malfunction. In his great 1943 book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo Ted Lawson described his first experience with the--at the time--cutting edge B-25 bomber aircraft: "I saw a lot of B-25's after that. I flew a succession of them as they went through their growing pains. Maybe I helped shake a few 'bugs' out of their first model."

Test Operator Logs

[DanielRavenNest]

I test space station software for a living,
and I do in fact have to do a written log sheet
when we run a test formally.

The test is also observed by a government observer, we verify the hardware and software configuration is per drawing before starting a set of formal tests, and I print and attach the test results to the log sheet. Then it gets reviewed by a number of people here, and sent to NASA, where it gets reviewed by some more people.

By the way, we have our share of insect problems, too. We occasionally get ant infestations under the raised floor in the computer room. It's most likely due to the break area in the basement being right underneath us (fridges & microwaves)

Daniel

Flaming Opti 895

[goldmeer]

My favorite computer bug was the opti 895 chipset.

You see, the opti 895 was a chipset for a i486 processor based motherboard. The 486 processor's ZIF socket (The mdern kind with a lever, before that you had to press the procesor into a socket and hope that you aren't breaking the traces on the motherboard) had an extra row of pins to accomidate the Pentium OverDrive Processor. This processor actually put a P5 core in a motherboard designd for a i486 processor. The nifty thing was ha it worked at all.

Getting to the bug: The outer row of pins on the socket for the 486 were only power and ground for the extra power consumption for the PODP. The specs were clear which ones were Vcc and which were Vss. Well, the opti 895 had 2 of the pins backwards. This was never found in testing. Many many boards were sold from various Tiwanese manufacturers. The boards ran fin until you purchased and installed a PODP into yhe board and powered up. The chipset would short, get HOTHOTHOT, start glowing, and burst into flame within minutes.

This was bought to out (I was working for Intel as OverDrive Processor support at the time) about a week after product launch. Can you imagine how that call went?

Caller: Uhhh... I installed tha part into my computer and it burst into flames...

Tech: Yes, the speed improvement is quite impressive.

C: No, you dont understand. My computer actually caught on fire.

T: (silence)

C: Hello?

T: Am I to understand that you have a fire in your computer?

C: Yeah, the smoke is getting pretty bad.

T: You mean to tell me that it is STILL ON FIRE?

C: Well yeah, the manual says to call you with the system in the current condition.

The motherboard was sent in (we replaced the system with a new name brand machine) and the chip was redisned so that one of the pins was removed. (Pin A4, IIRC)

I have NO idea how many motherboards we ended up replacing , but I know it was a bunch, even though it wasn't Intel's fault that opti couldn't read a pinout diagram.

Must have been 50 people tried to fix this one

[Mostly a lurker]

Equipment: 360/65 mainframe running OSMVT/ASP.
Problem description: At approximately the same time in the morning, on average about once a week, a job (different job each time) would fail with an I/O error on a specific 7-track tape drive.

It took over a year to track down the cause of this problem, which was very costly: the jobs were often time critical and mainframe computer time was costly anyway. We had top hardware CEs and systems programmers looking at this from every conceivable angle. Just about every component in the tape drive was changed.

The mystery was eventually solved by an observant computer operator. The tape drives were on the second floor of a building with a road passing just outside. At that hour in the morning, if the sun was shining, it was possible for the sun to reflect off the windscreen off passing cars and flash briefly on the read head of the tape drive. The tape drive interpreted this as invalid data.