Debugging

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, US Navy (Rtd) (often cited as the world's

first professional, paid-for-programming, programmer), began her

career on the Naval Ordnance Computer Project at Harvard during

World War II. The machine was offically called the Automatic

Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, and contained bank upon

bank of relays to act as switches.

More popularly known as the Harvard Mk1, it was devised and run by a

martinet, Howard Aiken. He insisted that every that occurred to his

precious machine was entered into a log.

One hot afternoon, a fault arose. Grace Hopper traced it to a

particular bank of relays, where she found a dead - electrocuted -

moth caught between the jaws of one relay.

She took the moth out, stuck it solemnly in the log, wrote the time

by the side of it and, underneath, her first claim to immortality -

"De-bugging".