Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR

Happy Birthday Computer Bug!

September 9th, 2009

I bet you didn’t know that it was a Navy Lieutenant who first coined the phrase “bug” for a problem associated with a computer!

You see, LT Grace Murray Hopper, while serving on active duty, and working at Harvard University found a moth had embedded itself in a relay in the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (we are talking about some pretty old technology ).

The operators taped the moth to the computer’s log, where it still resides, with the fifth entry for September 9, 1945 at 1545R: “Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.”

Some background on our famous Navy Debugger, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR, courtesy of navy.mil;

Grace Murray (Hopper) was born in New York City on 9 December 1906. She graduated from Vassar College in 1928 and received a PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1934. She was a member of the Vassar faculty from 1931 to 1943, when she joined the Naval Reserve. Commissioned a Lieutenant (Junior Grade) 1944, she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance and immediately became involved in the development of the then-embryonic electronic computer. Over more than four decades to follow, she was in the forefront of computer and programming language progress.

Leaving active duty after the war’s end, Dr. Hopper was a member of the Harvard University faculty and, from 1949, was employed in private industry. She retained her Naval Reserve affiliation, attaining the rank of Commander before retiring at the end of 1966. In August 1967, Commander Hopper was recalled to active duty and assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations’ staff as Director, Navy Programming Languages Group. She was promoted to Captain in 1973, Commodore in 1983 and Rear Admiral in 1985, a year before she retired from the Naval service. She remained active in industry and education until her death on 1 January 1992.