In honor of Women’s History Month at work, we were given a talk on women in computing. Part of the presentation was playing this YouTube video of the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman. It was extremely entertaining. Letterman seemed a bit unsure of the technical side of Adm. Hopper but he was a gracious host.
Admiral Hopper was known for many things including writing the programming language COBOL. She also found the first computer bug. (Go to the bottom of the page.)
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”. In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
