Travelling On The Silicon Road

Read some interesting trivia in a book, “The Silicon Boys” by David A. Kaplan on origin of “bug” i.e. a computer bug….

The University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1946 was the first attempt at a large scale digital computer. It was a huge thing and had 18000 vacuum tubes. The warmth & light of ENIAC’s tubes presented a problem – moths liked them and would trigger short circuits. Hence “computer bug” meant a problem inside and “debugging” meant fixing it!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Trivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.