In 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found an actual moth trapped in one of its electromechanical relays, causing a fault, and taped it into their logbook. What computing term is this famous incident credited with popularising?
- Byte
- Glitch
- Bug
- Crash
Why C? And why not the others?
Correct answer: C. Bug
On 9 September 1947, the team working with Grace Hopper on Harvard's Mark II computer traced a relay malfunction to a moth caught inside the mechanism; they taped the moth into their logbook next to the note 'first actual case of bug being found', and this vivid, well-documented incident is credited with popularising 'bug' as the word for a fault that makes a computer misbehave (the logbook page, moth and all, is preserved by the Smithsonian). The word 'bug' for a technical flaw actually existed even earlier, notably used by Thomas Edison decades before, but this 1947 moth is the famous moment tied to computing specifically. The option naming 'byte', a unit of eight bits, is wrong because that word was coined separately by engineer Werner Buchholz in 1956 and has no connection to this incident. The option naming 'glitch' is wrong because that word's origins trace to 1960s engineering and aerospace slang, unrelated to a 1947 relay and moth. The option naming 'crash', meaning a sudden program or system failure, is wrong because it describes total failure to run at all, not a specific, traceable physical fault like this one, and has no link to this particular story either.
Source: Smithsonian National Museum of American History: 'Log Book With Computer Bug' object record