When was the first computer bug discovered?

[Routaran]

My first was a ZX Spectrum+ way back in 1988. I had an absolute blast with this thing. Too young to really understand but it came with a manual with some tutorials for writing programs in BASIC. Typing in some numbers and letters and then seeing boxes appear and move on the TV, that was so cool.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ZX_Spectrum+.jpg

 

[Nik_2213]

Ah, line printers...

I remember our IT department's 'gofer' sneaking down to our labs, and hastily dumping an entire carton of triple-fanfold ( two carbons) green-striped '132' paper off his laden trolley into our skip.

As they usually shredded or re-cycled their waste, I investigated...

Leafing through the stack, I discovered each and every page was printed with two (2) instances of 'Syntax Error', one at the top, the other half-way down...

His department's gaffe kept us in carbon sheets and scrap paper for almost a year !

 

[dlgoff]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

And like this:

 

[nsaspook]

I built several homebrew 8080,Z80 machines (with 8080 powered graphics displays) in the 70's. I recently resurrected one old DIY Z80 cpu card as a PIC controller project to emulate some of the original memory and I/O.
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/memio-emulator-for-z80.117003/

 

[deRoy]

Many computers from 1982 onwards.

My favorite still is an HP48 SX/GX ( had them both ) programmable scientific calculator. A great computer in its own right.

Numerous programs I wrote for this calculator in RPL language. The longest one was to calculate the first 1000 digits of Pi, a program that I am very proud of I wrote myself. Another was to do RSA algorithm, artificial intelligence, games, there was no end as to what this calculator could do.

I still have them if anyone's interested.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'll see your Eye of the Tiger and raise you an Imperial March - on floppy drives. (3.5 inches - I'd love to do this on 8 inchers)

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Wife bought a Commodore 64 shortly after we got married, she says, anyway...

I probably didn't even know what a computer was supposed to be used for... she probably thinks I still don't... she's probably right. .

Was it Evo? (Keeping it secret? ...)

A Commodore 64.

 

[OCR]

Stavros !

...

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Stavros !
View attachment 217607 ...

Nice strike through! Did you use a Mac?

 

[OCR]

NO ... Evo's Commodore 64. .

 

[lekh2003]

My Epson LX-80 was loud compared to a Laserjet, but a true contender for the sawmill award was the IBM 1403. Memories of 132 column greenbar paper and stringing anti-static tinsel to lessen paper jams.

This is the kind of gold I like to see on the internet.

 

[Mr P]

Oric1 still have it in the loft somewhere.
A few years later we upgraded to a C64...

 

[John Malcolm]

I was at Oberlin College in 1965 when they got an IBM 360 "Cadet" which took up the entire basement of the Physics Building and had its own A/C. The manufacturer's rep said that "Cadet" stood for "Can't add, doesn't even try." Any smart-phone today can do much more.

We programmed the thing in Fortran, not so different a feel from BASIC. What felt really different is that each line of the program had to be typed into a card punch machine which would then output a deck of punched cards, one for each instruction. We had to carry that to the machine's card reader and insert it AFTER the compiler deck that told the machine how to interpret Fortran into machine language. If the compile failed, we would be told only the number of the first invalid instruction. After replacing that card, we would try again.

When our program finally compiled, we got an "object deck" from the output side of the machine's card reader-punch (which was the size of a nice bathroom cabinet, as I recall). We would then carry that back to the input side and feed it into the machine. Output, if any, was on a printer across the floor, about the same size as the card reader-punch. The output printer typed on green-and-white striped paper a couple of feet wide with a row of sprocket holes down the side that was conveniently perforated so you could tear it off. Storage was on massive magnetic tape drives along the back wall that stood at least six feet tall. Data access was slow, since the tape had to be searched by spooling.

There was no connection to anything outside the room other than through power cables. We used slide rules for ordinary calculations, since electronic calculators of the era were large, expensive, noisy, and required a power cord plugged into the wall. Looking stuff up meant walking across campus to the library, where actual physical books had to be retrieved and indices consulted to find page numbers with the data we needed.

Fortunately, climate change and dark matter were not of immediate concern.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

I was at Oberlin College in 1965 when they got an IBM 360 "Cadet" which took up the entire basement of the Physics Building and had its own A/C. The manufacturer's rep said that "Cadet" stood for "Can't add, doesn't even try." Any smart-phone today can do much more.

Way more! And, you know, these computers had real bugs sitting in and sometimes causing shortcircuit and malfunction! ... (That's where the term 'bug' actually comes from, as far as I know.)

 

[Terry M]

My first computer was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10, the first time-sharing computer and part of MIT's Project MAC. In grad school, I had the first mini-computer, a DEC PDP-11/20, all to myself. It took up 3 full-height equipment racks and was equipped with an admittedly small 64k disk and a teletype. The first personal computer I owned was the first model Macintosh.

 

[Sue Rich]

A Panasonic Business Partner in '93. Loved that machine.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

At school in 1971-1973 I used a timesharing computer service connected via acoustic coupler to an ICL 1900 at Southampton University, programmable in JEAN (a variant of JOSS) and BASIC using paper tape for storage. I also did some IBM mainframe PL/I programming during the summer vacation in 1973 and have spent most of my working life since programming IBM mainframes in various languages.

Other computers which I bought myself over the years during the pre-Windows era include:

- Sinclair Cambridge Scientific calculator (1974).

- Sinclair ZX80 (around 1980), on which I implemented Conway's game of life. Later upgraded to ZX81. Still have it.

- Sinclair ZX Spectrum (around 1982). Still have it.

- BBC Micro model B (also around 1982). The BASIC interpreter also had 6502 assembler built in. Still have it.

The cassette recorder I used for storage with the above three machines broke, so I'd need to find a working one to be able to use them again.

- Sharp PC-1211 Pocket Computer (early 1980s) which I think was later sold as TRS-80 pocket computer. Still have it. It uses Mercury cell batteries which I can't get now, but I got it running again temporarily using zinc-air batteries.

- Psion Organizer II (about 1987). Still have it. After I stopped using it as an organizer, I still used for years it as a digital metronome with a program I wrote myself.

- Psion Series 3a (about 1994). Still running although not used much; hasn't been rebooted for 23 years.

- IBM PS/2 and later IBM PS/1.

For most of my working life, I have worked using IBM mainframes. When I worked in Gothenburg, we had an IBM 4341 as a backup for our main IBM machine, but most of the time it was available for me to use for testing and experiments, so if someone asked if I had a personal computer I'd say yes, an IBM 4341 running MVS.

(I'm currently team leader for developing and supporting IBM's mainframe assembler, as well as helping to support various fossils such as mainframe Fortran).

 

[AgentSmith]

My first real computer was a Sears PC with 2 5.25 inch drives. One of the drives malfunctioned, so I had a huge 20 Meg HD put in. I thought my god I'll never need all this. It ran either PC-DOS or an early MS-DOS. Earlier I had a TI computer with a cassette tape drive, 16K of RAM, expandable to 64 K. I won't even talk about using a slide rule in physics, with the Bible(Haliday and Resnick), both of which I still have.

 

[BeamStudent]

The first computer I can remember being in our house was the Deskpro 386. The first computer I bought for myself was a Windows 98 machine in 1998 with a 3DFX Monster video card! Played Diablo and and was soon hooked!

The first computer I worked on in 1961-63 was the AN/FSQ-7 -- the largest vacuum computer ever built (while in USAF). Kept us all safe from the communist hoards

 

[Stavros Kiri]

The first computer I worked on in 1961-63 was the AN/FSQ-7 -- the largest vacuum computer ever built (while in USAF). Kept us all safe from the communist hoards

Did it have bugs?
Cf.

Way more! And, you know, these computers had real bugs sitting in and sometimes causing shortcircuit and malfunction! ... (That's where the term 'bug' actually comes from, as far as I know.)

 

[TGVF]

As a student (1973-76), I learned FORTRAN II programming with an IBM1130, (codes made of punch cards, extremely slow execution). As engineer, I very much appreciated the introduction of the HP9845A (1979), with featured specific high speed magnetic cassettes and was very easy to program using the powerful HP extended BASIC with its amazing graphic package.
My first home computer was a Tandy Radio-Shack TRS80 Model 1 (bought in 1980): Zilog Z80 processor 8 bits @ 1 MHz, no HD, no floppy, just a keyboard; 16 line*64 column black and green screen; standard cassette tape recorder for codes & data; OS cast in a 12 Kbyte ROM; 16 Kbytes RAM; langage= BASIC or binary code (assembler had to be loaded from cassette). Lot of fun, since complete documentation was available (hardware, software) and could be modified ad libidum.

 

[mathwonk]

the first one i wrote a program for was a univac mark 1, in about 1963. it filled an entire room and needed to be fed punch cards.

the first one i actually brought home was a macplus with 1meg of ram, in maybe 1984 or 1987. it was considered portable, since i was strong enough to carry it in a large backpack. i still had it in 2013 when we moved and it had always worked before, but when cranked up that day it just gave a puff of smoke so i recycled it. maybe rats got into it in the attic.

 

[f95toli]

An Atari 800XL
http://www.old-computers.com/Museum/computer.asp?c=27
I bought it used in about 1985. I must have been about nine years old and it had taken me ages to save up for it (probably a couple of years).
I had one game (on cassette); Bounty Bounces Back
http://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Bounty-Bob-Strikes-Back-perfectten.png

 

[TheOldFart]

I instead programmed it via the switches which was arduous and of little help in trying to debug the program so I lost patience.

I was on a Lafayette class FBM submarine in the early 80's. The missile control center still had a very long bank of toggle switches for entering targeting information. Hopefully they didn't lose patience and just wing the last few bits! :p

 

[DrClaude]

Way more! And, you know, these computers had real bugs sitting in and sometimes causing shortcircuit and malfunction! ... (That's where the term 'bug' actually comes from, as far as I know.)

The last part is not correct. The term bug to designate a defect or fault goes longer back. The OED gives a reference from 1875, way before computers.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

The last part is not correct. The term bug to designate a defect or fault goes longer back. The OED gives a reference from 1875, way before computers.

In engineering in general yes. But OED (Oxford English Dictionary) is perhaps a too generic type source. For use of the term "bug" (and "debugging") more particularly in computer science, it seems though that the turn point (in 1945 & 1947) is due to Grace Brewster Murray Hopper [1906-1992] (early computer scientist & USA navy):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

"AnecdotesEdit

Photo of "first computer bug" (a moth)

Throughout much of her later career, Hopper was much in demand as a speaker at various computer-related events. She was well known for her lively and irreverent speaking style, as well as a rich treasury of early war stories. She also received the nickname "Grandma COBOL".

• While she was working on a Mark II Computer at a US Navy research lab in Dahlgren, Virginia in 1947, her associates discovered a moth that was stuck in a relay; the moth impeded the operation of the relay. While neither Hopper nor her crew mentioned the phrase "debugging" in their logs, the case was held as an instance of literal "debugging." For many years, the term bug had been in use in engineering.[35][36] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C."

[My edit note:] Computerworld in the following article gets the dates more accurately (1945: 1st comp. bug incident ; 1947: possibly prevailing of the term(s) ..., as "Harvard's Mark II came online in summer of 1947, two years after the date attributed to this story. "):
"Moth in the machine: Debugging the origins of 'bug' "
https://www.computerworld.com/artic...-machine--debugging-the-origins-of--bug-.html