This is maybe the first computer bug, and relates to one of the more famous anecdotes adorning the legendary reputation of Grace Hopper, one of the most important developers of the computer in the 20th century. Hopper (d. 1992 age 85) earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale and was working as a professor until after the outbreak of World War II, when she enlisted and used her computer programming skills for the war effort. She was the key developer of the computer language COBAL, which used English words in programming. The story behind the computer “debugging” term is perhaps apocryphal, but Hopper was said to have found the moth in one of the electrical switches in some computer machinery, and so gave the term to the expression meaning to fix up a program’s glitches.
