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Where did the BUG come from ?

Bug means "insect" in English and it has also become the term used to describe any computer incident. But why is that ?


It is important to know that the term “computer bug” is not all that recent. Thomas Edisson had used it in his notes when he worked on computer projects in the 1870s. But the term was only popularized, according to legend, on September 9th, 1947 by Grace Hopper. That afternoon, while working on the Mark II computer, a moth entered the machine's system. It was at this very moment that the system broke down (from a thermal shock) and Hopper wrote: "the first known case of a bug having been found".



From there, the scientists and then the press used this term to refer to a computer incident.

It is thus thanks to a simple moth that the first computer bug was literally born, the first of a long series, ...


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