The worlds first computer bug
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 1947.
OK, this is not the most beautiful collage ever seen. But this bug, found in the computer room at Harvard by technicians searching around for what was wrong with the damn machine *this time, was extracted from the computations that caused its death and taped to a piece of graph paper, carefully labelled and preserved. It was not the first bug to invade a computer, the glowing tubes of which used to attract them with some regularity. But it was the first bug literally documented by becoming part of the document. And it went on to become not only part of the the document, but part of the documentation: we de-bug things, first computers, and now all sorts of things, as our technological metaphors seem to swarm everywhere and get into everything. Not unlike, well, bugs.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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