The story of the world’s first software bug
Technologic advancement has been plagued with bugs, pretty much ever since there was technology to advance. As early as the 1800s, Thomas Edison referred to issues with his “apparatus” as bugs. And even before that, false signals in telegraphs were also considered bugs.
Not even Edison could resist the “insect vs. tech bug” play on words, which is kind of cool even if it does mean this particular joke is getting very old. In a way, it’s comforting to know that tech nerds in 1878 loved a good dad joke, as much as tech nerds in 2024.
And so dear reader, with that semantic context out of the way, we’re going to jump about 100 years of hardware and mechanical engineering into the future, as we enter ~our computer era~ and with it— the beautiful world of software programming.
The history that’s been collected here, is the fruit of 3 hours of caffeine infused spirals through both Wikipedia and the very niche corners of Reddit you yourself may have haunted.
