Paul J. Nahin

“Another completely different way that the contacts of a relay could fail was if dirt or an insect got trapped in the spacing between contacts. If a fly or a moth, for example, happened to be sitting on the make contact when the coil was energized, then it could be squashed and, after its smashed little body dried, the contacts would be covered with a very disgusting but quite effective insulator. To clean up such a disabled relay was called debugging, a term that has survived in the vocabulary of modern computer users trying to fix their faulty programs. This is not a joke—I heard it as a quite serious story in a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1982 from a legend in computer science, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a Yale PhD mathematician who worked during the Second World War with Harvard’s five ton, 800 cubic foot Mark I relay computer, which when operating was described as sounding like a “roomful of ladies knitting.” To debug such a machine must have been an “interesting” job for someone;”
― Paul J. Nahin, The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age