September 1947, Harvard.

September 1947, Harvard.

Engineers working on the Mark II computer find a dead moth stuck in a relay. They tape it into the logbook and write next to it: "First actual case of bug being found."

That page is now in the Smithsonian, moth and all.

Most people tell this as the moment the word "bug" was born. It wasn't.

Thomas Edison was already calling small faults "bugs" in a letter in 1878. By 1934 it was in Webster's dictionary.

So the Harvard team wasn't inventing anything. They were making a joke. "Actual" is the funny word in that note 😄

It usually gets credited to Grace Hopper too, but even the Smithsonian says the logbook was probably not hers.

A good story beats the true one almost every time.