Computer bug

A computer bug is any problem with a computer, whether caused by software or hardware.

The term "bug" was in use among engineers and repairmen well before the dawn of the Computer Age.

American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines "bugs" for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were built during the early 1940s, people working on them found bugs in both the hardware of the machines and in the programs that ran them.^[1]

Yet, credit for popularizing the term is generally accorded to computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who is:

... she traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. The bug was carefully removed and taped to a daily log book. Since then, whenever a computer has a problem, it's referred to as a bug.

References

Moth in the machine: Debugging the origins of "bug" - Did Grace Hopper really invent the term "bug" to describe software errors? - Computerworld staff - September 5, 2011

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