Read Admiral Grace Hopper, US Navy (Rtd) (often cited as the world's first
professional, paid-for-programming, programmer), began her career on the
Naval Ordnance Computer Project at Harvard during World War II.
The machine was offically called the Automatic Sequence Controlled
Calculator, or ASCC, and contained bank upon bank of relays to act as
switches.
More popularly known as the Harvard Mk1, it was devised and run by a
martinet, Howard Aiken. He insisted that every that every event that
occurred to his precious machine was entered into a log.
One hot afternoon, a fault arose. Grace Hopper traced it to a particular
bank of relays, where she found a dead - electrocuted - moth caught between
the jaws of one relay.
She took the moth out, stuck it solemnly in the log, wrote the time by the
side of it and, underneath, her first claim to immortality - "De-bugging".
