Who discovered the first computer bug?

Answer 1

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist in the US navy who discovered in the late 1940s that something was wrong with one of their computers (which was called Mark II). Some technicians ended up taking it apart and finding the problem was that a moth was stuck in a relay. She pasted the moth in her logbook and computer "bugs" were born.

Answer 2

a moth

The term "bug" had been in use for any malfunction or error of a machine long before electronic digital computers existed.

Its first use referring to a computer problem was on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer, when a moth got smashed inside the contacts of a relay causing a failure. When the failure was located and the moth removed from the relay, the operator on that shift taped it to the logbook below the entry on the failure and labeled it First Computer Bug. That morning Grace Murray Hopper came on duty and read the logbook and thought it was a great story to tell every time she spoke somewhere. The first computer bug wasn't even in an electronic computer, the Harvard Mark II was electromechanical.

Answer 3

Probably not, but she did describe an event in 1946 that happened while she worked at the Computation Laboratory at Harvard University, where a moth got trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II computer, causing a program malfunction. This may have helped to popularize the term. The term "bug" to mean a malfunction or error was used by Thomas Edison in a letter to an associate much earlier, in 1878, long before there were electronic computers.

Answer 4

Grace Hopper