A Bug in the Machine
It is disputed that the phrase “A Bug in the Machine” was coined by two different women which lived during completely different centuries. The first comes from Ada Lovelace who was attributed to being the World’s first programmer. It was in the year 1842, after Charles Babbage lectured on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin in Italy, that Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was commissioned to translate the lecture from Italian to English. The reason she was attributed as the first programmer was due to her extensive knowledge of the Analytical Engine and her innate ability to understand how to program it. She surmised very precise details and steps one would need to take in order to get the engine to do what one would want. This led to her translation to be over 3 times as long as the original version in Italian because of the many notes and additions she made to the translation. One of her great discoveries was that she found “a bug” or error in his programs. The second comes from Grace Hopper, an Admiral in the US Navy, who in the 1940s was working at Harvard translating programming code into machine code. During her work there, she found a literal insect in the computer. Regardless of who in reality can take credit for finding a bug, the word has been adopted by computer technology vernacular.
