The first computer bug was a literal moth, pulled out of a relay in a Harvard computer in 1947 and taped into the logbook with the note “first actual case of bug being found” — and the logbook is still preserved at the Smithsonian

At 3:45 in the afternoon on September 9, 1947, a team of engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer were trying to figure out why the machine was malfunctioning. The Mark II was a beast — an electromechanical computer the size of a room, built for the United States Navy, full of thousands of