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An unnamed technician working the night shift on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer. The machine had failed while working a problem sometime earlier and he had been troubleshooting it. He tracked the problem to a relay whose contacts would not close properly. When the relay was removed and replaced, a moth was found smashed to death in the old relay's contacts. When he made the entry in the logbook for that problem he referred to the moth as "the first computer bug" and taped the moth into the book to prove it.

When Grace Murray Hopper came in on the day shift she read the log entry and thought it would be a great story to tell.

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