Dagen en rigtig bille ødelagde en computer

Én maskine havde en rigtig bille indeni. Send dette til programmøren i dit liv. I nitten syvogfyrre stoppede en af verdens første store computere pludselig med at virke korrekt, og ingen kunne finde problemet.

One machine had a real bug inside it. Send this to the coder in your life. In nineteen forty-seven, one of the first big computers in the world suddenly stopped working correctly, and nobody could find the problem.

Ingeniører gennemsøgte maskinens store væg af kontakter og ledninger, indtil de fandt årsagen fastklemt mellem to metalkontakter: en død møl. De fjernede den, tapede kroppen fast i deres logbog, og skrev en kort note ved siden af om at have fundet en rigtig bille inde i maskinen.

Engineers searched through the machine's huge wall of switches and wires until they found the cause stuck between two metal contacts: a dead moth. They removed it, taped its body into their logbook, and wrote a short note next to it about finding an actual bug inside the machine.

Ordet bug betød allerede et lille problem i en maskine før den dag, men den tapede møl blev berømt alligevel, og den findes stadig på et museum. Siden da er det at rette en computerfejl blevet kaldt debugging, uanset om der er et rigtigt insekt involveret eller ej.

The word bug already meant a small problem in a machine before that day, but the taped moth became famous anyway, and it is still kept in a museum. Ever since, fixing a computer problem has been called debugging, whether or not any actual insect is involved.